


Ethical Considerations

by CopperBeech



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Human, Anal Sex, Anathema's Bicycle - Freeform, Angst, Asexual Character, Aziraphale Eats Oysters, Aziraphale Loves Crowley (Good Omens), BAMF Anathema Device, Crowley Catches The Curtains On Fire, Crowley Has Chronic Pain (Good Omens), Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley is Good With Kids (Good Omens), Eventual Smut, F/M, Fluff, Gay Sex, Hairdresser Crowley, Homelessness, Hurt Crowley, Hurt/Comfort, Inventive uses for tea, M/M, MP Gabriel, Massage Therapist Aziraphale, Meet-Cute, No but hear me out, Nonbinary Beelzebub (Good Omens), Oral Sex, POV Aziraphale (Good Omens), Past Abuse, Protective Beelzebub, Protective Crowley (Good Omens), Trans Character, Wall Slam, Workplace Relationship, Workplace Sex, parental homophobia, past trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:48:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 36,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26163664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperBeech/pseuds/CopperBeech
Summary: Aziraphale Fell isn’t exactly in the closet, but he’s not made it much further out than the hat-stand. The hairdresser at the spa where he’s just taken a job is far too flamboyant for his liking – doubtless, that’s why he can’t get the man out of his mind. His boss is a grouchy, nonbinary terror, who has an inexplicable soft spot for a priggish conservative MP from Oxfordshire. His best friend can’t stop predicting he’s fated to couple up soon. And the rent is due.
Relationships: Anathema Device/Newton Pulsifer, Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Beelzebub & Adam Young, Beelzebub & Crowley (Good Omens), Beelzebub & Gabriel (Good Omens), Crowley & Adam Young (Good Omens), Sergeant Shadwell/Madame Tracy (Good Omens), Sister Mary Loquacious & Crowley
Comments: 668
Kudos: 310
Collections: Ixnael’s Recommendations





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A massage therapist AU, because what other kind would I write? TW for some mild internalized fatphobia, description of a possible suicide attempt in later chapters, some awkward moments of misgendering (Aziraphale in this AU is a middle-aged, diffident gay man who is not really up to speed with the gender spectrum, but he gets there), homophobic/transphobic attitudes and slurs, averted sexual assault, and some nongraphic descriptions of injury and past violence. Nine chapters of flirting and fluff and smut, four of increasing whump and angst, and sweet sunshine at the end.

"Well, your paperwork all seems to be in order. Helps me out. Half the damn job is paperwork, licences, certifications, background checks. You’d not believe how many people _forget_ things. Pull my hair out.”

For someone in the beauty industry, the small person behind the desk looked as if she – he – had actually had a recent go at pulling her, oh, well, _their_ hair out. There was quite a lot of product in it, the black colour was suspiciously absolute and flat, and the two big red clips holding it away from their forehead had been jammed in any which way, pulling the strands of hair gripped in them tight. It looked like they hurt.

“Aziraphale Fell, what kind of a name is that? A stammer?”

He’d been warned that the manager here was cantankerous and crusty, but he’d expected an overly made-up, perfectly coiffed middle-aged woman, which described every one of the spa managers he’d worked for up to now. Instead, here was this fine-boned, short-statured creature of indeterminate gender, skin looking as if it were in desperate need of one of their own establishment’s buffing treatments, jacket cuffs inkstained and slightly frayed like a child’s security blanket entering its fourth year of use.

Their business licence, stuck up askew on the bulletin board over their desk, read simply “B. Damien.” Operating as Lilith’s Escape Day Spa. He wondered idly who Lilith was.

“My family were Army. Salvation Army, I mean. Our father was quite, well, serious about it. I’ve got a sister named Haniel, but we all called her Hannah. Aziraphale was an angel of music, you know how the Army is about music.”

“Yeah. Everybody in the band. Well, I’ll get used to it, you can just call me Bea if I can call you Az. Life’s too short for long names.”

They shuffled to the next page in the folder.

“You’re a bit old to be doing this work.”

“It was – ah – well, a second career. A sort of epiphany, you might say. I worked at a charitable trust until my early thirties – some family connections and – well, one day it wasn’t a good fit anymore.”

“Yeah, know all about the family stuff. And Carmine used to be a personal trainer, got sick’ve standing over people and counting, she said. This way she gets paid to beat ’em up.”

“Ah – I suppose you could call it that. I like to think of it as repair work. Like a good auto mechanic, only with people.”

“Oh, our hairdresser’ll like that. Been dating his car for the last two years. So you were supervising the masseurs at – Paradise Spa. Weren’t they in the news? Can’t quite remember. Why’d you leave a fancy address like that?. West London’s a dump. At least this part.”

“Well – ah – you’re right, there was a bit of bother in the newspapers.”

“Dish.” Bea closed the folder and crossed their hands on top. They had a ring on every finger, almost the only concession to ornamentation in a business where it was customary. That, and impeccable, long, shaped nails with a sparkling gel varnish.

“Well, there was a bit of a – thing – um – some of the young ladies – delightful, well-bred young women, I’d never have imagined – they were doing things that they, ah, shouldn’t have with some of the gentlemen clients. I _did_ wonder that we had a lot of gentlemen clients. There was a sordid episode with the Metropolitan Police.”

“Coming back to me now. Closed the place down.”

“Exactly. But even before we knew we wouldn’t open again, I’d tendered my resignation. There was never any complaint against me. But it was on me to catch what was happening, and I didn’t. I thought it best.”

“Well, your letter of recommendation is certainly glowing. Just understand, you won’t be boss of anybody here. It’s a small place, but I need someone else because Carmine’s on half time now that she went and got pregnant like a chowderhead. We get a lot of people for massage because we’re near the airport, work out the travel kinks. Fair number of men too, but that’s because Carmine brought ’em with her. Athletes, say she’s the only one can pound ’em out. Nothing dodgy.”

“I can manage that. I’m quite strong.”

“Yeah, I see.”

“I do German style and Chinese Tui Na. I’m afraid I’m not as good at the more, ah, ethereal techniques as some people.”

“That’s fine. You’re what we need. I’d say you’re hired, start on Monday? I’ll have everything ready for you to sign.”

“I – ah – I had a date to look at a new flat, but I’ll change it. I was living close to Paradise, but it’s really too costly now. And a long commute. I was hoping for something closer.”

“Shouldn’t have a problem. No one wants to live in this dump, plenty of places going spare. All right, might’s well go have a look at your digs here. Third door at the end of the hall. We’ve got the usual stuff, plus foam rollers, sports tape, if there’s something you use that we don’t have just let me know and we’ll order it in.”

“You don’t want – ah – a trial session?”

“Don’t like to be touched myself. Be here at nine.”

They cocked a thumb toward the door. Interview over, apparently.

A dry, possibly dark sense of humour suggested itself in the poster that faced him as he left the office, a soft-focus image of a sculling team in the hazy dawn with the motto: _Get To Work._ In smaller letters: _You Aren’t Being Paid To Believe In The Power of Your Dreams._

Good thing, he thought.

The hallway was clean and well lit, with plants and less dispiriting art (if you didn't count a questionable still life), but the paint had the thick, tired layering that said the building had been here a little too long, and the humid atmosphere from assorted treatments and audibly churning laundry machines suggested a struggling ventilation system.

The door stuck a little, unsurprisingly, but opened to a sharp smack, the momentum propelling him forward into a darkened, windowless room like every other bodywork studio he’d ever occupied, over the padded edge of a massage table – a familiar sensation – and directly across a pair of bony knees in what felt like tight denim trousers. A sharp yelp coincided with his winded huff.

“ _Bloody ‘ell – “_

“I’m so sorry – “

There was the sound of a fingersnap, and a low light appeared. One of those sound-activated switches. Clever.

The resulting glow – from a salt lamp on a shelf at the head of the table – backlit the shoulder-length red hair of a lanky man dressed entirely in skin-tight black, now up on one elbow and regarding him with a sly grin, as if someone weighing twelve stone hadn’t just fallen hard across him. He smelled of sandalwood and something vaguely peaty and the faint ghost of the spa’s front room where the hairdressing stations were.

“I’m so dreadfully sorry,” repeated Aziraphale, pushing himself gingerly up. “I didn’t know anyone – “

“Don’t be,” said the man, who he could now see sported a jet-black stud earring – Aziraphale’s hand went reflexively to his own half-healed piercing – and some sort of complicated tattoo on one temple. “Best offer _I’ve_ had all day. What’s your name, beautiful?”

“Ah – Aziraphale Fell. Bea says she’s going to call me Az.”

“Oh, not nearly pretty enough for you. You’re the new physio than?”

"Well ah. Strictly speaking _bodyworker._ It would be unethical to call myself a physio - "

"Oh, then I absolutely _shall."_

“Uh, well. Just having a look in – “

“Leave you to it then. Just came back here for a kip, late night, back playing up on me. You cannot _imagine_ how they slave-drive little Annie.” The back of one hand went dramatically to his forehead; there didn’t seem to be a gay inflection or mannerism he’d failed to adopt. Aziraphale winced. ”Anthony J. Crowley. I’m sure we’ll be seeing plenty of each other. I am _indentured_ to the Monarch of Hell.”

“You don’t really call her, ah, them – ?“

“To their face? Absolutely. They love it. _Let them fear me, so long as they obey me._ That’s Tiberius. History prize at Secondary.”

“You needn’t run – “

“Ah, but I do. The Goth wannabes and stately ladies of a certain age will soon be swarming in from all round Hounslow. We shall meet again. I won’t forget the handsome prince who woke me with a stumble.” Brighter light from the hallway brought out his features – sharp, big-jawed, eyes a warm yellow-brown color just short of suggesting cosmetic contacts. Older than his fluid movements, about forty? Enough to have slight crow's feet, not enough for the flick of grey Aziraphale was starting to see in the mirror. He lifted an arm and waved with what some people would call a limp wrist, except that it was a serpentine movement of controlled grace. The nails were varnished a glossy black. With the other hand he slid what seemed like an entirely unnecessary pair of sunglasses out of his half-buttoned shirt front and popped them on. “Toodle pip, darling.”

 _Serpentine_ didn’t even begin to describe the movement of his hips as he turned and receded. The chunky heels of cordovan boots might have been responsible.

Well, _that_ was an exit.

 _Dear Lord,_ thought Aziraphale. _That is possibly the most beautiful man I have ever seen._

He was screwed, and it was barely ten o’clock in the morning. A record even for him.

* * *

“Anathema! I took a turn around so I wouldn’t be early. I didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”

“Power went out at the shop again. Something about that electronics place next door. The new guy came over to apologize and say he’d fix it, but I just closed up. I ordered the sampler, I know you like that.”

Aziraphale slid into the booth. The neighbourhood’s restaurants were overwhelmingly Asian, but Anathema had insisted that the best taboulleh and ful medames could be found here. A vegetarian, she was an obligatory connoisseur.

“So you got the job?”

“You’re going to say you saw it in my aura.”

“No, you look faintly shocked. I’ve noticed you always look shocked when something good happens.”

She’d known him long enough.

“The good thing I want to happen now involves a mezze. I couldn’t eat breakfast, I was that wound up.”

“I didn’t know you were ever _that_ wound up.”

“I really didn’t expect to get hired at the first go. And rent’s due, and I was a bit reckless and laid in a case of Montrachet, and I’m still paying off our last shopping trip.”

“I only needed a new tripod for my theodolite. _You’re_ the one who decided to upgrade your whole sound system.”

“It was an investment in the arts.”

“Right. So tell me about the place.”

“Well, it’s rather shabby, but they seem to stay busy, and the owner is a frightful little miniature dragon who comes up to about my shoulder and very possibly picks their teeth with the bones of children. I say their. It isn’t quite certain and it seemed rude to ask.”

“You going to be the only physio?” He had given up explaining to Anathema, too.

“There’s a pregnant Amazon, apparently. I didn’t meet her. She sounds quite formidable.”

“And the hot guy?”

“There was no, ah, hot guy.”

“There was.”

“I assure you.”

“Your aura just changed colour. So did you, actually. I told you, I read for you and said you were going to prosper and find a soulmate. _And_ passion. The cards were very particular.”

“Dear, we know that’s balderdash. I’ll give you the ley lines because there’s history there. And the herbs have a solid background in the antique _materia medica._ But there is _no_ way a deck of cards can promise me love.” He placed the fingertips of both hands over his heart – where had a gesture like _that_ come from? He did his best to avoid obvious theatrics. “I’m an old duffer, and quite happy with my books and sound library.”

“You aren’t even fifty, Aziraphale, and your aura is _shimmering_ with thwarted lust.”

“Says the woman who hasn’t had a date since last Halloween.”

“That wasn’t a date. It was a _working_ , which went spectacularly to pieces when he found out I didn’t work _naked_. And it’s Samhain, not Halloween, the Americans have made a commercial mockery of it.”

“Anyway, you’re the young one, and you spend far too much time hanging about with an older gentleman who is not, um, on the correct team.”

“I like you. Shut up and eat your hummus.”

The starters had arrived. Aziraphale drizzled olive oil; Anathema scried in the oil puddle and predicted an older woman would solve his financial problems.

“Absolute tosh, dear.”

He speared an olive with his fork. Life was good.

He was sensible.

And there simply would be no _hot guy._

****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> House joke. The friends I made in Heston and Feltham circa 1997- 8 persisted in referring to me as a physio. Most of Aziraphale's professional trials have been mine, except that I didn't supervise anyone at the place that got busted.
> 
> If you liked, share, reblog, comment! Come noodge me on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale confronts Hurricane Tracy. The flamboyant hairdresser is inordinately distracting. And we briefly meet Gabriel Sennet, MP.

There was, Aziraphale observed in the weeks that followed, no shortage of older women who might be candidates for Anathema’s prophecy – if it hadn’t been, of course, poppycock like all of her prophecies. (He cast his mental gaze aslant from the time she’d told him confidently that he’d find a particular old book he’d been searching for, and it appeared in a stack of tired self-publishing disasters at an Oxfam shop within a week.)

Anthony Crowley ( _little Annie_ , Aziraphale remembered, wrinkling his nose a bit at the affectation) had not been joking about the stately ladies of a certain age, who were queued up on his schedule every morning to be coiffed and shampooed and rinsed and touched up, all the while chattering with him about everything from the gentlemen they’d met to their godsons and granddaughters. They brought him little potted cactuses and homemade biscuits. They greeted him with cheek kisses and took his advice on colours. (“You’re a _Winter,_ dear, and I’m not just saying that because you’re naturally _snowy_ now. That’s your tone and you can’t be wearing that pale pink, it just _drains_ you. Do something bold.”) They told him they didn’t know what they’d _do_ without him. “Run off to Barbados, I’m sure, darling, without me to hold you here,” he’d say, and wave them out to their ladies’ luncheons.

He clearly, however, had a special soft spot for Tracy, who came in unfailingly for her coiffure every Friday morning. She favoured dresses patterned with hibiscus flowers and gauzy scarves, and no suggestion by the esthetician could deter her from laying on cosmetics with the kind of heavy hand that was either outdated or very modern, depending on your age.

He’d been busy with Carmine’s overflow bookings and finally caught a breather. Not that many people wanted a bodywork session at ten in the morning, but he made sure to be available.

“Anthony’s in the back with Bea. He’ll just be a moment.”

“Oh, good. I’ve a date tonight.”

Tracy’s banter with Anthony suggested that she had had a great many dates in her life. Possibly, Aziraphale had begun to infer reluctantly, _business_ dates. _I had one couldn’t manage unless he was well paddled._ Mirror held up. _One of mine read “demolition agent for temporary,” um, you know._ Loud snort. _And I thought he’d come in for the other advert but he only wanted his palm read, and I almost made him wash his –_

The giggles from the last station on the end were a feature of every Friday. He’d hear them as he passed in the hall, and at first felt a little disapproval and a little shock (memories of Paradise were still raw, the ahem _objects_ taken into evidence from the other studios, and the commotion, and the police constable showing his badge to Nigella), which gradually gave way to fascination.

“You’d be Tracy, wouldn’t you? We’ve not properly met. Aziraphale Fell.”

“Well, I hope he picked himself up.”

“I mean, that’s my – “

“I know, dearie. Just having my laugh.”

“I was named after an angel. A bit of a thing in my family.”

“So there's a whole family of angels _fell._ I know the feeling, dearie, but it’s not so bad when you get used to it. Why’d you take out your earring, then?”

“My – ah. Oh, that was a youthful folly.”

“I think a nice pearl would suit you.”

She seemed disposed to get right to the point of things.

“It was just a bit of rebellion. Didn’t go over with the pater, and I still lived at home at the time, so – well. It’s closed up now, anyway.”

“He can’t stop you from getting a new one, can he?”

“Well – ah – I expect not.” Why on earth was he standing here answering these questions instead of going back to say _Anthony, Tracy’s here?_

“I know a gentleman. Skilled in, let’s say, _intimate_ piercings, so you wouldn’t even feel having that ear sorted back out. One and done, Bob’s your uncle. Between here and the Heath, I’ll bring his card next time.”

Crowley’s voice came from behind him. “ _There_ you are, darling. Devastated to make you wait. I see you’ve met our new physio.” Aziraphale inhaled, decided to say nothing, exhaled. 

“Oh, is that what you do? I must book you. My knees aren’t what they were, they could use a bit of help, but that Carmine girl is simply too _rough."_

“You are a tender flower, Madame Tracy. She’s simply a brute who doesn’t understand. Battering all those footballers and crossfitters.”

Aziraphale left them to it, feeling a bit battered himself.

* * *

He tried not to look at Crowley.

He was successful, for the most part. If _successful_ meant not being caught at it. There was, after all, hardly anything else to look at if he popped into the laundry alcove with a basket of sheets, only to find the hairdresser bending over to scoop capes and robes out of the dryer. Sitting in the front on a slow afternoon, enjoying the light from the floor-to-ceiling windows after working all morning in a dim room, leafing through his latest find while Anthony bantered his way through a comb-out, dancing around the workstation and the shampoo tray, striking hipshot poses – well, it just gave Bea or their scheduler a coffee break. He’d gotten handy with the phones and the appointment book, he’d handled it all before.

He tried not to think about the end of the month, too. His first paycheck had been held back, that was standard in this kind of work, and he was just going to skate in with _most_ of the rent. He really shouldn’t have bought those bamboo towels, but they did feel divine. At least his bookings were steady.

He managed to work Tracy in at the end of his fourth week. He was diplomatic about the huge bunions, the obvious abuse of a lifetime of high heels, which she persisted in wearing.

“You can put a little lift under here, so your toe can grip more. It’ll take the stress off the inside of your knee. I’m on my feet all day, you’ll find it helps. All right, this might be a bit sore.”

“Oh, you’re not nearly so rough as that gladiator girl. I shall absolutely be back.”

She was gushing as she emerged to take her seat at Anthony’s station.

“You simply _must_ book with him if you haven’t. He positively is an angel, it’s not just a name. Now make me extra lovely, dear, I’m seeing the Sergeant again tonight and I think something special might happen.”

She was just leaving as Aziraphale came up to the desk at the end of his next hour, to book another repeat appointment. He could smell the perfumey grease of a fresh application of Jungle Red as she favoured him with the same cheek-kiss she always deposited on _Anthony_ before leaving.

“Ta again, love. See you next week.”

Crowley was leaning bonelessly on a chair when Aziraphale looked up, regarding him with amusement.

“It’s all right, _Angel._ I’m not jealous.”

“She’s just old fashioned.”

“I didn’t say of whom.”

Aziraphale pretended not to hear that.

* * *

“Oi! Bea! Your favourite _member’s_ here!”

Crowley’d glanced out the front window, slung himself around the doorjamb leading to the studios and office, hallooed down the hall. The nail artist, who was going over her schedule with Aziraphale at the front desk, snorted.

“By which I mean,” said Crowley more softly as he passed back by them, “that he’s a _giant prick.”_

The man who rang his way in was almost comically buff, like an action figure, the sleek bulk of his muscles showing just that much through his tailored suit. He looked like someone who adhered to the Paleo diet and boasted about eating to live instead of living to eat. His barely silvering hair was sculpted with product, the Masonic ring on one hand polished till it refracted, his eyes, as he glanced over at the little knot by the desk, a startling shade of violet. He seemed faintly familiar.

“Is Mz. Damien in? I’d like to say hello, if I may.” His manner suggested that no one ever told him he mightn’t.

“Oh, we _know,_ darling. Go on back. They’ll be waiting with bated breath.”

The man looked as if he’d smelled something a little sketchy, and assayed Aziraphale with an unsmiling glance before striding past.

“Meet Gabriel Sennet,” said Crowley with the gesture of a game-show girl indicating the next big prize. “MP for West Bouncybollocks. Regular customer and all-round prat. You’re welcome.”

“For a politician he didn’t seem, ah, very _friendly.”_

"Darling, a politician is merely someone who dishes dirt on other people faster than they can dish it on him. And he dinna care for oor sort’ve folk.”

Sometimes a faint Scots accent would creep into Crowley's London bray; Aziraphale was still trying to place it. He noticed it came out when Crowley felt stressed, like the day Celia double-booked him.

It was the first time he’d said anything to suggest Aziraphale had anything in common with him.

“What’s he want with Bea then?”

“Oh, they go back donkey’s. Used to come in here for his _manly-cure_ back when he was first standing for Council election, when he was just another sad bugger from West London. Says the place is good luck for'm. And likes to have that buff bottom pounded after a hard day in the gym. No worries, darling, it’s Carmine always has to give him his lashes. Seems no one else can cope with his _density.”_

The manicurist was breaking up, sputtering into her hand..

“You behave now, Iris. Mister Miracle won’t be happy if he thinks you’re laughing into his _cuticles_. Go set up.”

* * *

“He _is_ quite the snack, isn’t he? Isn’t that what the young people call it?”

It was Friday again, and Tracy was waiting her turn with Anthony, still wearing the spa robe and slippers from her session.

“Who?” Aziraphale feigned to look over her shoulder at the gossip magazine she’d just picked up.

“Not Alex Pettyfer, silly. It’s just icing on the cake, but Anthony’s _so_ easy on the eyes.”

“Ah. I was miles away.”

He hadn’t been, and Tracy probably knew it. It was just a bit of people watching, he told himself. Anthropology. Observing the wild Crowley in his natural habitat.

He told himself, too, that when he’d woken up that morning, from the sort of dreams one couldn’t help having sometimes, the kind that made you need to take care of business, just a spot of bother, that he hadn’t been thinking about that red hair, those campy inflections. He was an adult, and adults didn’t have thoughts like that about co-workers, especially co-workers whose mannerisms were affected to the point of absurdity. Adults knew when their wild days were behind them, that few years after he’d left the Trust were just a reaction, he hadn’t even needed to get tested since the first days of the Brexit campaign.

“You could come out with us tonight.”

“Ah – ? Sorry, woolgathering.”

“The Sergeant and me. We always have a bit of a knees-up on Fridays at the Globe and Star, I’m sure Anthony’s coming this week. I’d love you to meet the Sergeant.”

“Well. Maybe.”

“All work and no play, dear.”

“Speaking of. Must go sort the room out.”

“It’s just past the Post Office and down two blocks, cozy, none of that loud music. They do a wonderful bubble-and-squeak.”

“Thanks. Ah – I’ll think of it, looks like I’m busy here.”

“Toodle-pip, Angel,” called Crowley over his shoulder.

* * *

“Who’s this _Sergeant_ anyhow?”

“Oh, they’ve been seein' each other awhile now. Daft old bugger, thinks he’s in the Army of Righteousness, here to redeem a wayward woman.”

“Not Sally Army, surely.” _Please, say no._

“Nah. Some bollocks of his own. Mind, I think she’s been givin’ him a good redeemin’, you ask me, but maybe he’s waitin’ to do it all proper. The _signs_ are all there.”

Crowley swept his hand in a wide balletic arc. Aziraphale thought of Anathema and her encyclopedias of portents.

“Well, he sounds like a bit of a character.”

“You can meet ‘im.”

“So she said.”

Aziraphale considered it.

* * *

He was still considering when Crowley darkened the door of his studio at the end of the day. He didn’t have to look up; the clop of those high-heeled boots (snakeskin, he’d discovered) announced him, though just at the moment they were irregular, one light, one heavy. He didn’t need to look up to imagine what he’d see.

“Ah – angel.”

For once the sarcastic tone was absent from the sobriquet.

“Wondered if I could ask fuir a bit of angelin’.”

All the shrill inflection was gone from his voice, replaced by the faint burr, the deeper timbre. Pain was written on his face when Aziraphale looked up; he was leaning in the doorway, all his weight on one foot, back of one hand to the other hip.

“Hate t’impose, but I’m fooked, and not in a good way.”

He wasn’t making it up. Aziraphale followed that thought immediately by wondering why he thought Crowley might.

“Can’t really stand up straight. Caught me in the laundry room. Got a loaded day tomorrow, I mean ‘f’you’re tired I understand, I can lie on a heating pad – “

“Oh no. Please. Come in.”

Crowley leaned on the end of the table, which Aziraphale had just made up for the next morning, sat himself gingerly on one corner.

“It’s going to be your deep hip flexor. I can already see that.”

“Tell me somethin’ I don’t know. Goes on me every so often.”

“So you know it’s going to hurt.”

“Can’t hurt worse than this.”

“All right, I’ll pop out and – unless you need a bit of help.”

Aziraphale was already imagining the contortions that getting out of those jeans must require on a good day. Just professionally. It didn’t bear thinking about what it must feel like if your back was out. Some of the older ladies had trouble undoing clasps and things, and he gathered they were all so grateful for that _sweet_ young man Aziraphale, he could drape you just so, help without making you feel the _least_ stared at, not a _ladies’ man,_ you know, a girl can tell.

“Ah – no worries, angel. Just be a tick.”

His face was youthful with relief when Aziraphale came back in, just from getting his weight off his feet; the sheet over his long frame looked like the drape over a nearly finished reclining sculpture. Saint Sebastian, or a Bernini Pieta.

“You _will_ insist on working in those boots. It can’t be comfortable.”

“Never a bother. Think I spent too long yesterday leaning over’n engine compartment.”

“Ah, that’s what Bea meant by dating your car.”

“Well, in the absence of other offers. Told y’ the day y’got here.”

That grin again. Aziraphale mapped out the shape of a sharp hipbone through the sheet.

“Better if I work from the outside here. No fingernails.”

“Never one for S and M, myself.”

“What sort of car is it?”

“Antique Bentley. Got her running like a top now, just puttin’ the touches on the restoration. Want to get an MP3 player in there without messin’ up the original dash. Ngk.”

This last seemed to refer to the muscle trapped under Aziraphale’s fingertips, just inside the bowl of his hip.

“Easier to work this on someone as lean” ( _beautiful)_ “as you. Raise your knee a little. There.”

“Don’t eat. Survive entirely on Italian roast and little old ladies’ homemade biscuits. Ah, angel, you’re good.”

He was used to long sighs like that and gave it a moment.

“It always gets into the thigh muscles. Let me just tuck the sheet here.”

I can see with my hands, he said to himself. That’s what they told me in training. I don’t need to look down. Spectacles off, it’s stuffy in here anyway. The light oil, and not much. Nothing _sensual,_ this is auto mechanic’s work.

“I expected it. Knots all the way down here, it’s bending over like that all day.”

“Easier way to make a livin’ than bendin’ over all night.”

Let that pass. “And you’re asking for it to get into your knee.”

“Sssss – bloody hell, angel, you’re pushin’ me through the table.”

“Barely even using my weight. Your quads are losing the argument with themselves.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“This’ll take some work.”

The rhythm carried him. He could do this in his sleep, to say nothing of with eyes closed, finding the taut strings and gnarls in that sculptural confluence of sweeping curves. You could almost tell more without looking. “You’re holding,” he said, “I’ll try longer strokes, easier to let go – “

He hoped he didn’t stop speaking with obvious abruptness when his knuckles bumped up against what he hoped it wasn’t.

Crowley’s eyes were closed too. He tried to keep his own, which had snapped open, focused up there.

 _Dear Lord, how do you stuff that into those jeans?_ A thought quickly followed by _he’s as uncomfortable as I am._ No, that wasn’t possible.

Aziraphale knew perfectly well what it looked like when a man got a little bit of a stiffy during a session. It’d happened to him. You got relaxed, a little euphoric, and John Thomas woke up and checked the weather, a little full against your thigh, a little heavy if the therapist’s hand bumped into it, something you learned to discreetly buffer (along with the client’s embarrassment) by wadding the sheet or noting the room was cold and adding a blanket. Or maybe suggesting a prone position.

Prone wasn’t an option with this injury. He thought fast.

“A little range of motion, I think.” Bending the leg up at the hip got it squarely between himself and what he was trying (wasn’t he trying?) not to look at. “It’s a bit chilly – I sometimes forget, I get hot so easily,” _damn,_ “I mean you might relax a bit more if I get a blanket – let me get a bolster under your knees here, see to your neck. It helps everything relax. All to the good if you fall asleep for a bit, it’s a natural reaction.”

* * *

“Loads better, angel. S’pose I owe you a trim or summat.”

“Ah – I’m still seeing my old barber in Mayfair. No worries, as you say. Happy to help.”

“Might get through tomorrow.”

They were so very, very light and casual as they closed up. Aziraphale wondered how long they’d been alone in here.

_Don’t think like that._

He left the sheets for the morning. He could come in and start the wash early.

_It’s a natural reaction._

You got a little relaxed, a little euphoric. It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened when the work _hurt._

_Never one for S and M, myself._

Right you are, Fell, he told himself as he picked his way to the bus stop through a gathering drizzle. You’re fat and frowsty and on track for fifty, and of course that gorgeous creature’s going to get into a state like that over _you._

He was already home when he remembered Tracy’s invitation. He checked the clock, the balance on his Oyster card, and had almost picked his umbrella back up when he remembered: _I’m sure Anthony’s coming this week._

It was a fine night to stay in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been there with the diplomatic sheet wadding and blanket doubling, and except for the first place I worked --and fled after all of a month -- everyone's always been a perfect gentleman about it. Sometimes it does just happen.
> 
> If you're enjoying, please share, reblog, comment! And trouble my rest on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is absolutely no hot guy. Aziraphale swears it, and would he lie?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for a bit of fatphobia. Bea has no patience.

“You’ve been avoiding me.”

“I never, Ana. It’s just been awfully busy.”

“I’ve been texting you. Even you know how to answer a text. You’re dodging.”

The reception in the back of the spa was so-so and he’d stepped outside into a faint drizzle to take Anathema’s call. She was, of course, quite right, as she inevitably was,

“I’m out on Pyewacket. What if I stop by in about twenty minutes? Get some lunch? You booked?”

“Well – not until two, but – Really, I’m trying to tighten my budget up – “

“My splash. I got a contract to do weekly readings for someone’s book club. Anything to keep the public amused.”

“Mountebank.”

“Arse-basher.”

“I resent that.”

“I allude purely to your occupation.”

“I resent it nonetheless.”

“See you in twenty.”

Pyewacket was an old-fashioned girls’ bicycle – lacking gears, or much else in the way of improvements, except for a handlebar basket – which Anathema, in defiance of good sense and personal safety, rode all over London. She would speak at length, if not prevented, on the irresponsibility of using fossil fuels to get from place to place when the power of one’s own body was so much better for oneself and the Earth. Aziraphale was fairly sure that at this point she could broad-jump over the Thames at the Embankment if she’d cared to try.

“I really had forgotten all about it,” he said as the olives and labneh arrived – the Lebanese place had become a favourite – and Anathema tucked in gracelessly. Cycling did use up fuel. “But the lease is up at the end of the month and I got a rent increase notice last week, and I simply don’t know how I’m going to manage, it’s far too soon to ask Bea for a raise –– “

“I know. I did your cards last night. Four of Pentacles. Financial privation. Have you been buying French wine by the case again?”

“I’m not even meeting friends at pubs. Some of the old things have been asking. Well, one, anyway.”

“You’re not to become one of those fading queens who courts the attention of older ladies to balm his sad loneliness.”

“Very poetic, dear.”

“Did the hot guy show up yet?’

“There is absolutely no _hot guy_.”

“There is. Plain as day. Saw it again last night, Page of Wands, unknown but faithful. You’re probably dodging again.”

Aziraphale had his baklava put up in a clamshell for later – “look at the time” – and they got back to the spa just ahead of Tracy, who waved spiritedly from halfway up the block, broke into a tottery double-time, and disoriented him by flinging her arms around Anathema.

“Dearie. It’s been ages.”

She dropped her eyes to the spandex cycling tights, the flat-soled clip shoes.

“All the way over here? That must be murder on your knees, or does Angel here sort you out too?”

The now-obligatory, perfunctory cheek kisses whiffing of lanolin. Anathema gave Aziraphale a dire, warning glance, and mouthed _fading queen_.

“I’ve been going to Ana’s shop for years, it’s worth the trip across London, but, well, I’ve been seeing rather a lot of someone lately – “ Tracy was addressing Anathema now – “I don’t suppose you’re still holding it back?”

“Under the counter.”

“She has the most gorgeous crystal balls. I used to be a bit more professional, retired mostly, but I couldn’t resist it. – I’ll be in, I promise – very soon – I’m hoping the Sergeant will want to get me a birthday gift – well, don’t let me keep you two.”

“Just leaving. I’ve been feeding lunch to _Angel_ here and trying to figure out how he can make rent.”

“Ana, really – “

“Dearie! Why didn’t you tell me? You know I’ve been able to put a bit by – “

“One absolutely does _not_ borrow from clients, there are very strict ethical rules – “

“ – I was going to say, by letting out the second bedroom ever since I retired. It’s made a tidy little nest egg for me, but it’s going spare just now. It couldn’t possibly cost what you’re paying for a flat in the middle of London. We could sort you out.”

“I really couldn’t – “ It remained an ethical teeter-totter, amounting to acceptance of favours from a client, however occasional. But then, she wanted to let the room to _someone._ And the rent of that usurious Central London studio was due. He'd leased it furnished, which was why it was costing him the earth; one room might hold everything that was actually his.

“We’d be a bit cozy, but I’m over at the Sergeant’s a lot now, and I only do crystal reading one day a week for old customers – “

“It would be imposing – “

“Don’t say that till you’ve seen it. Ana, I’ll call in – “

Anathema had slung her leg over the bike saddle, and was stuffing her long dark hair into a fluorescent helmet, with an amused expression.

“Answer calls,” she said to Aziraphale as she flicked away the kickstand. Her eyes went past him to the window of Lilith’s Escape, where Crowley was waving archly at the three of them, and as Tracy turned, blew a kiss.

“Hot,” murmured Anathema.

“Do you think so? It must be all that exercise, dear – I still feel cold for the time of year.”

* * *

If he took up Tracy’s offer, he could still afford something nice now and then. There was a jeweller’s in the street around the corner from his flat, and he’d gotten fairly adroit at pretending he wasn’t actually looking. Just choosing to walk down that block to pick up some takeaway.

Today he paused, hands behind his back, contemplating one of the velvet-covered rails in the display. The plain white pearl studs were tasteful and understated, but there was something that drew him about the smoky gray ones, and a few were nearly black.

Bodyworkers didn’t get to wear much jewelry; he’d put away the gold signet ring he’d worn to work at the Trust, which seemed to make people think he was married -- part of the intent – and adopted a watch on a chain, a small thing that didn’t weigh down the pocket of his work scrubs. But this wouldn’t get in the way of anything.

Tracy had a point. She’d fuss pleasantly to see that he was celebrating his move, and if he was a fading queen flirting with older ladies, so be it. His NatWest card wasn’t maxed out yet. He could see her _intimate piercing_ fellow (the mind reeled) at the end of next month, come in to work, see if anyone noticed –

The black ones were sold only as a pair. Well, one to spare if he lost one. The backs were always coming off. Or a gift for someone, or –

_Sign here, please._

Apparently he’d bought them.

* * *

“For the last time, no. No pyramid schemes, no dodgy new-age crap. If this place goes to Hell, I’m doin’ it my own way.”

“It’s not a pyramid scheme. You’d be getting in at the ground floor, I’ve been working on it with Raven and Silver, I’ll want something when I take leave after the baby – “

Carmine, who was just starting to show, was leaning over the front desk, her trailing red hair – Aziraphale wondered how she worked with hair dangling everywhere – almost touching the open pages of Bea’s schedule book. The unhealthy-looking man standing next to her reminded Aziraphale of recovering anorexic clients he’d had, with their hollow cheeks and muddy skin tone. He held a sample case of some sort, and the albino woman at his left elbow sported a little tiara and a flounced skirt, like the Gothic Lolitas you sometimes saw on the Tube, going to clubs.

“Looks like the usual sun-powered candyfloss to me.”

“It’s a synergistic package,” said the skinny man, setting out little containers on the scheduling desk. “Ms. Zuigiber trains subscribers in a specially paced form of fasting cardio. They use my appetite inhibitors and protein-sparing superfood in place of two meals a day, and Ms. Silver here has exclusive rights in the UK to market metabolic supplements from the most innovative company in Japan – “

“I’ve heard of that crap. Toxic. Not in my shopfront.”

“I’ll leave some literature. Don’t say no today.”

“Fine, fine. Bugger off now, I’ve got work.”

The pair jingled glumly out, leaving Carmine standing there in her red scrubs. Bea picked up the glossy brochure the man had left, crumpled it and tossed it over their shoulder, hitting the wastebasket blind.

“I’m just trying to help us both. I know the rates are going up.”

“It’s not the end of the world.”

“What about you? Would you try it out?”

Azioraphale realized she was talking to him.

“What? Ah – no.”

“You’d be a perfect Before and After. People here see you every week. Transformation. Belly to buff, we’d have you down three sizes in no time.”

“I’ve, um, got a client. Five minutes.”

Maybe adornments were silly. He patted the small box in his pocket. He’d thought of showing it to Anthony, but not today.

* * *

It was a typical ugly London pigeon, and it looked as if it had just chosen the pavement in front of Lilith’s Escape to keel over ungracefully on its side and die. Aziraphale was kneeling over it when Crowley came out to see what had made him pause on his way back in from the walk he’d decided to take instead of lunch.

“Ugh, I’ll get a bin liner and the dustpan,” said Crowley. “Don’t touch it. They’ve probably all got diseases.”

“No, wait, I don’t think he’s gone.”

Gingerly, he held a hand over the feathered body.

“Angel, know you got magic hands, but I don’t think it works on pigeons.”

“I saw him fall. A peregrine had him. You see them, more around the Heath, but I’ve spotted a few here.” Like all big cities, London had its own odd roster of wildlife. “He’s just stunned. It’s what they call the freeze response, when a creature’s trapped by a predator. If they play dead, maybe the hunter thinks they’re carrion and they won’t actually die. There’s a fine tremor here, that’s how they come out of it.”

“Feathered rat.”

“It’s still one of God’s creatures. You’re safe now, little one. Take your time.”

An odd silence descended on the pavement. The sounds of cars became distant, and Aziraphale felt Crowley’s eyes on him without looking up.

“Humans do it too,” he said. “Only we don’t give ourselves time. Try to come out of it. Other people poking us to come out of it. Instead of just keeping safe until it’s over. People think they’re all right, but it leaves broken places. There’s bodywork for it, just not something I'm trained in."

The pigeon trembled, the black ball-bearing eye popped open, the wings agitated in a little roll of miniature thunder. Scaled feet dug into Aziraphale’s thumb, and suddenly the pigeon burst skyward in an iridescent flurry, staggering a moment and then banking up to disappear over the roof, leaving him with hands upraised.

“Abracadabra,” he said to the general welkin, with a small flourish, looking up to meet an almost dazed stare.

“You _are_ a bloody angel,” said Crowley.

* * *

He didn’t cross the hairdresser’s path again until closing time, when the hamper of oily sheets had become almost unmanageable. Those tight stovepipe jeans were the only thing visible, the long body doubled again to yank things out of the dryer.

It’s been a week. Be a professional. “Back holding up all right?”

Crowley jumped.

“Ah – sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you. Only that’s an awful position, you’re going to put it out again.”

“Been champion since you fixed it, thanks. Me, Tracy, pigeons. All in your sorcerous hands.”

“Just in a day’s work – “

“Never did thank you properly. Give here.”

Crowley took the drawstring bag of sheets and set it aside, leaned in to deposit a cheek kiss, like Tracy without the greasy lip rouge.

“Honestly, it was nothing – “

Aziraphale discovered that he’d decided to return the kiss. Crowley’s beard was fair but grew in rough by this time of day, and his jaw was sandpapery against Aziraphale’s lips, his scent still the same mix of smoke and sandalwood from the first day.

The odd silence again, like that morning on the pavement. The churning of the washer, its intermittent whir and reverse, sounded remote.

Crowley’s breath ghosted against his cheek. The very intense thought _I should not be doing this_ froze him ( _if they play dead_ ) and gave way to the equally intense pull to know how those thin, silky-looking lips felt against his own. Tasted. _The handsome prince who woke me_. It was an indulgence to imagine himself handsome – fat, fusty Mr. Fell, _you’d be a perfect Before and After_ – and Crowley’s lips _were_ silky, just a little parted, a whiff of bitter coffee on his breath, he lived on it, meant to tell him that’s bad for the pain. Crowley had slipped a tongue-tip out to taste _him,_ both fists in the small of his back, pulling the cushion of his belly flush against what was not just a natural reaction to bodywork, and blood was slamming into his own centre with painful, unforgiving suddenness. He pushed himself back.

“Ah – Anthony – we shouldn’t – “

Those amber eyes devoid of all archness, all slyness. Dazed.

“I mean – you’re very nice – “

A long beat of silence. “Nice.”

“But – you know, we really can’t. We work together. It’s, well, an ethical consideration. And, um, so obvious.”

“Right,” said Crowley, and the word seemed to take a day to utter.

“And – ah – there was a complaint at my old place. Nothing I did, but I really need to be – I’m sorry, it’s not that I don’t like you – “

“Yeah.”

Fists dropped to his sides now, still not opening. White at the knuckles.

“Go on home, angel. I’ll put these in and close up.”

* * *

When he got back to his empty flat he took the earrings out of his pocket and slid them into the back of the dresser drawer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're still with me, share, reblog, comment! Come irritate me on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh, Mary!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Aziraphale still can't wrap his head around genderfuck.
> 
> Sister Mary, whom we meet in this chapter, is a blended portrait of a black drag queen who roomed with one of my old college friends (the night we all did Salome’s Dance Of The Seven Veils will live forever in my memory) and a psychology professor at the Catholic university where I once worked, whose outrageous camp performance in my office nearly gave the Dean a heart attack. The " 'vailable" line is a direct quote. Good times. RIP Victor, dead in the first wave of the AIDS epidemic aged 43.

For the next couple of weeks he kept himself to himself. There was plenty to do: give notice at the leasing office, box up his things, shuffle most of them over to the back of Anathema’s shop – she’d somehow managed to extract a favour from the electronics shop clerk, who had a clammy handshake and a diminutive blue automobile that went by the name of Dick Turpin, for whatever reason. “Happy to help a friend of Miss Device, she’s been very patient with all the power cuts – “ Dick Turpin apparently suffered from the same problem, and stalled in traffic about twice on every trip, but eventually they did get there.

He found he could pack a lunch and eat it in the studio space. It saved a few quid, he reasoned. Turn over a new leaf. Maybe trim up a bit. Back in the day, he’d never had much trouble pulling someone in a club. He pushed away the thought that he hated the music and the awkwardness and that, in the end, it hadn’t really seemed worth the bother. Only he’d woken from those dreams twice again now – all right, three times – and it would be nice if there were someone – to have someone who – well, workplace romances wouldn’t do. He wasn’t desperate.

Bea stuck their head in one afternoon. “You okay, Az?”

“Never better.”

“Just wondered. You been holed up in here like a badger.”

“Ah – just a little overextended. Feet up when I can. Getting ready to move, keeps me up late.”

“Whatever. Everyone’s pissy lately, Carmine still wants me to sell power shakes, got her head in the bog every morning now, Twinkletoes out there racked his back again, oughta open up a casualty ward. Just wanted to be sure you’re still alive back here.”

“Spiffing.”

“Yeah, you sound happy enough to shit yourself. There’s cake, go cheer yourself up before the locusts get it all.”

There was always a plate of doughnuts or a tin of Danish biscuits on the hall table, which he’d been trying to avoid. Today it was a tray of little homemade cakes. Really one had to try one. Giggly voices from the front.

“Is someone having an orgasm back there? Can I have one too?” Unfamiliar, shrill, affected.

“Oh, that sounds like the guardian angel of our righteousness, come down from Heaven again to grace us. All right back there, _angel_?” Another little explosion of giggles.

“These are scrummy, where’d they come from?”

“Trace brought ‘em by. _Celebration, dears, the Sergeant finally popped the question.”_

“Sorry to miss her. I was lying down.”

Yet another flurry of giggles. “ _I_ want to see the _angel.”_

A head popped around the doorjamb: tightly kinked hair close-cropped, latte-coloured face heavily made up, a nose stud.

“Oooh, you’re right, she’s _pretty!!!”_

The tee shirt over the almost-flat chest had a glitter design, the flounce skirt was ruffled in contrasting colours, the sneakers were hightops. A rainbow feather boa trailed from one arm.

“Sister Mary, meet Aziraphale.”

“I’ve heard _so_ much _about_ you.”

Aziraphale found the boa thrown around his shoulders.

 _“Ravishing._ You _have_ to wear it to Pride.” _Sister Mary_ turned to Crowley, who was clearing up his workstation. “Isn’t she lovely?”

“I assure you, my pronouns are _he_ and _him,”_ said Aziraphale, returning the boa. He was only just becoming familiar with this way of introducing oneself, and spoke rather stiffly.

“Oh, pretty boy has _pronouns.”_

“Ah – what are yours?”

“I contain _multitudes._ Currently I am Mary Loquacious, a postulant in the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. And you _must_ join us for Pride. We’re a very new chapter. An angel is all we lack.”

“I’m not – “

“ _Oh, Mary!”_

“I was going to say, I’m not fond of loud public events. I know it’s unfashionable of me.”

“Ah, Az wouldn’t fit in. He won’t say shite if he has a mouth full.” Crowley’s face was turned away, so it was hard to tell how wry, or not, this was.

“ _Language,_ young master Anthony. Go to Mother Superior’s office and be prepared to write _lines.”_ Sister Mary snatched up a business card from the workstation. “Anthony J. – when did we get a J? What's it for?”

“Nothin', actually, just thought it sounded good – “

“It should be V. For _‘vailable.”_ She – he – oh, bother – pointed dramatically at Crowley, who was wiping down the shampoo tray. “She’s _available._ ”

“You’re all having too much goddam fun out there.”

The voice came out of the back in a carrying bellow. Sister Mary exploded in a hand-smothered, sputtering burst of titters.

“Clean it up, the Antichrist is on his way over.”

Bea appeared in the doorway, picked up a cake and shoved it in their mouth more or less whole.

“Oh then, Sister Mary must _flee_ from Infernal influences.”

“Outa here,” said Bea.

“Can I leave leaflets for Pride?”

“Onna windowsill. Take this thing.”

The boa had fallen to the floor. Bea picked it up with all the relish of someone removing a rat from a trap.

“It’s for her,” said Sister Mary, flicking Aziraphale’s face with the dyed plumes and tossing the boa back around his shoulders. _“Kissy kissy._ All right, Sister Mary must _fly_.”

“Y’ought to give it a chance, angel,” said Crowley to the back of the door. “Bit’ve fun.”

“I hardly think it would suit me.”

“Oh, that’s right, hair shirt’s more your style, ennit?”

“Crowley, that’s not fair – “

“Oh, it’s just _Crowley_ now, is it?”

 _“Don’t make me come back out there!”_ Bea’s voice carried from the back, warningly.

 _“Uncle Tony!!!”_ came a shout from the jangling street door, before they could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So far as I know, London does not have a chapter of the [Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence](www.thesisters.org) (an international performance art and benevolent organization of gay and trans nuns, with connection to multiple resources from crisis care to “finding beauty”), but we’ll just say they do now.
> 
> If you're having fun, share, reblog, comment! And bother me on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


	5. Chapter 5

“Hey there, Hellspawn.”

The alleged Hellspawn in question was blond, blue-eyed, apple-cheeked, husky, and currently swinging the taller but leaner Crowley around in a circle, making his feet fly completely off the floor.

“Angel,” wheezed Crowley through laughs as he was put back down, “meet the Antichrist, AKA Adam Young, AKA the Pride Of Oxfordshire, and Auntie Bea’s favourite nephew.”

“Only nephew,” noted Adam, philosophically.

“Let you out of the cage early?” said Crowley..

“Mr. Sennet wanted to go back to the County office. He said I could ride with him but I wanted to hang with you.”

“Gonna let me give you a punk spike then? Make an entrance when you come back.”

“Can’t wear that in Mr. Sennet’s office.”

“ _No dye, no tattoos, no piercings,”_ Crowley recited as if from a manual, sweeping his own hair back in a pose that exposed his own tattoo (it had turned out to be a stylized snake, forked tongue extended). For Aziraphale’s benefit: “Mister Muscular Christianity insists on the _masculine ideal.”_

“Is that the Son of Satan I hear out there?” came a voice from the business office.

_“I’m here, Bea!”_

“Really the son of a very ordinary drummer from up near Oxford,” explained Crowley to an increasingly perplexed Aziraphale, “but Bea likes to swear he’s a changeling. Doesn’t look like either of his parents. Dead clever, Youth Leadership thingy, intern in the local MP’s office, yada yada. And somehow not a prat. You’ll like him.”

“Whatever is he doing here?”

“Well, believe it or not, Bea’s actually his aunt. Uncle. Auntnuncle. Said he was destined for greater things than West Bouncybollocks and talked their sister into letting him live down here with them, intern with _the Member_. Keeps telling him he’ll have the world at his feet someday.”

“And you’re _Uncle Tony_.”

“I am the tempter who lures him from the strait and narrow path, into my building’s car park on the weekends. I share my bride with him. I send him back to the august chambers on Monday mornings with grease under his nails, telltale signs of an illicit passion.”

“Ah, that’s why the black varnish.”

“Rumbled me, angel.”

“I assumed it was just an – “ ( _affectation)_ “Sorry, I mean, not at all my sort of thing” ( _I could take each of those fingertips in my mouth, one by one)_ “but really, I don’t judge anyone for having their own style” ( _if I put my lips to that tattoo I’d drown in the sandalwood scent from your hair),_ “it was just a bit early in the day for that – _ebullient_ young person – “

“Oi, shut up a moment, won’t you?”

Aziraphale shut up.

“I need to say something too. ‘Bout earlier. That was bitchy of me and I shouldn’t’ve.”

“Oh, no harm done. I’ve been called stodgy.”

“Only Mary’s had a lot to put up with. Mum and Dad turfed her out when she was fourteen, over the dressin’ up business. Never backed down.”

Aziraphale touched his pocked earlobe. _Didn’t go over with the pater, and I still lived at home at the time._

“She’s held my head through every hangover I've had in the last fifteen years. Went all over London once lookin’ for pink biscuits because it was the only thing I wanted to eat. Don’t like her to think someone’s gettin’ judgey on her.”

“I understand.” Aziraphale turned to go.

“And – well, ‘nother thing, just oughta say, not on you that I expected somethin’ I guess I shouldn’t’ve. We can be friends, can’t we?”

When he turned back Crowley was extending a hand, his face candid, open, hopeful. He wasn’t batting his eyes, just blinking, Aziraphale had noticed how sensitive he was to light, that was all it was, the sunglasses in his pocket not ( _an affectation)_ but something he needed to go out into the world.

The touch of his hand was hot, dry. _If that were on me. Where no hand but mine ever touches._ He met the amber eyes steadily.

“Oh, absolutely. Friends.”

* * *

Text from AJC to Hellspawn:  
 _Comin to see your girl this wknd, got the window mouldings and headlamps_

Reply from Hellspawn to AJC  
 _Ready to rock_

Text from AJC to Hellspawn:  
 _Get those manlyman cooties off you_

Reply from Hellspawn to AJC  
 _Your heterophobic_

Text from AJC to Hellspawn:  
 _No I just think your boss is a xunt  
_ _Cunt  
_ _He’s a xunt too  
_ _I’m sure that’s something cursed  
_ _Does Bea look at your phone_

Reply from Hellspawn to AJC  
 _Not after that they don’t_

Text from AJC to Hellspawn:  
 _OK, got a special job comin up  
_ _See you in the am_

* * *

Text from LittleGildedFly to AJC  
 _You forgot to unload the dryer again you berk_

Text from AJC to LIttleGildedFly  
 _Told you b4 I left. I’m off the clock now darling, ciao_

Text from LittleGildedFly to AJC  
 _Don’t feed him too much pizza_

Text from AJC to LIttleGildedFly  
 _No such thing_

* * *

Text from strangedevice to handsoflight4004:  
 _Back room’s full. How many books do you have?_

Reply from handsoflight4004 to strangedevice:  
 _Dear, if you know how many books you have you simply aren’t a reader._

Text from strangedevice to handsoflight4004:  
 _If you read all of these you’re never going to look up and see the hot guy_.

Reply from handsoflight4004 to strangedevice:  
 _Your prurient concern is misplaced. I am currently immersed in an infusion of Molton Brown’s best lavender bath salts, becoming younger by the moment. Soon they shall all fall at my feet, and I shall spurn them._

Text from strangedevice to handsoflight4004:  
 _Sounds like another evening in.  
_ _See you on moving day._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: drinking with Scotsmen!
> 
> If you're enjoying, share, reblog, comment! And screech at me on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bit of Aziraphale's story, and the folly of drinking with Scotsmen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Polishing on the later chapters is going a bit quicker than expected, so I should have the next one up by tomorrow or early Monday, and a couple more over next week. Chapter 7 will be slightly longer, but well, the plot thickens.

Moving day arrived, and with it, unexpectedly, Crowley and Adam, who appeared as Anathema was struggling to install a van-hire app ("I don't know, Newt said something about an oil-pan gasket") -- playing a tattoo on the horn of an impossibly glossy, black antique car just visible from his window, ensconced in the _loading zone only_ section of pavement in front of the building.

“I am a subtil serpent, and have my ways,” explained Crowley over Aziraphale’s sputters. “Actually, Bea ratted you out. Think this lot’ll fit in the boot. About four trips.”

“You’ll be all day – “

“Saves you the hire. Said you were tight. You get that big box, Hellspawn, delicate Uncle Tony’ll manage with the lamps.”

“Hot _and_ slinky,” said Anathema as the pair receded towards the lift. "At least _someone_ knows how to swoop in for a damsel in distress."

“ _Do_ hush, dear.”

“Who’s the kid?”

“Boss’s nevvy. All boy, and so on.”

“Funny flash from his aura. Like he’s fated to topple Power.”

“There are far too many sage fumes in that poky little shop of yours.”

“It’s poky because half your things are in my back room.”

“Do let’s get a wiggle on.”

It was five trips, not four, and Tracy pushed food at them on every lap (Adam accounted for most of it), and Anathema insisted on being the only one other than Aziraphale to handle the pared-down core of his book collection, _if anything’s missing you’ll never hear the end of it,_ and Aziraphale reluctantly stripped to his undershirt as the day decided to heat up unseasonably.

“Quite the snack _yourself,_ Mr. Fell,” murmured Tracy on the third trip. Then, with a smack to his forearm: “Don’t look so shocked, I didn’t ask you here to be my gigolo. A girl knows better.” She winked. “If anyone _else_ notices, I know what a necktie on the doorknob means."

* * *

“Well, I left a good while back, really. Before you were born.”

“ _Everything_ happened before I was born,” said Adam matter-of-factly, digging into his second plate of bubble-and-squeak.

“So I wouldn’t have crossed paths with your Mr. Sennet. Who seems even more, how can I say, _vigourous_ about everything than my own father. We just parted company over what, ah, constituted good works.”

“And a man’s bevvy,” said Shadwell, who was on his third whisky. He was gruff, and leathery, and smelled of stale tobacco, and looked at Tracy as if she were the riches of the Earth.

The Globe and Star turned out to be remarkably cosy, almost a caricature of an old-fashioned local: scuffed wood benches, low light, no irritating _bebop_ on the sound system, just something vaguely Celtic playing too softly to be intelligible and a silent game of footie on the screen over the bar.

“It does seem rather criminal to begrudge a young man his pint after a day’s hard work.”

“Meaning _we_ won’t tell Mister Personality if you won’t,” said Crowley, returning from the bar and thunking down a pint of bitter next to the half-empty plate of cabbage and mash. “Drink up, you’re with adults.”

“Legal now,” said Adam around a mouthful.

“So is it Uni in the fall then, ducks?”

“S’pose so.” Adam didn’t look enthusiastic.

“I keep tellin’ you, Hellspawn. Your choice.”

“ _Everyone_ keeps telling me something.” The last of the bubble-and-squeak disappeared. “Your witch lady wanted to give me a bunch of New Age papers. Save the world, like.”

Anathema had begged off the pub, saying something about a working, but apparently not missed a chance to proselytize.

“Not on. You’re the Destroyer of Worlds.”

“That was last week’s game. We’re playing Civilization now.” The end of the pint followed the bubble-and-squeak. “You could come.”

“Pass tonight. Gotta put my feet up, get an ice pack on these old bones.”

“Oh, dear, I’m sorry – “

“No worries. Get Carmine to sort me out tomorrow.”

Tracy edged around to face Aziraphale as the pair retreated.

“All right, dearie, now tell us all about yourself. Don’t leave anything out.”

* * *

“Mum and Dad were very strict Salvation Army, so I grew up with the fear of Hell simply _drilled_ into me. All meant to be soldiers of the Lord, you know. I remember going up to the altar during a service when I was fourteen and absolutely _pleading_ to be kept from the hands of the Enemy.”

“Aye, hard to be a poof wi’ all that, ennit?”

Aziraphale blew a mouthful of stout over the remains of his bubble-and-squeak.

“Nae fash yerself, laddie, Marjorie” (Tracy, apparently, was a professional name) “told me plain when she asked y’te move in. Mind, I’m nae a jealous man. She’s retired.”

Tracy’s hand crept into the Sergeant’s. They really were rather sweet, odd a couple as they were.

“And ma brother was devoted to his batman all his life, lived together till he died, and have ye no’ read a line of Bobby Burns?”

“Love, he doesn’t want to hear you reciting _John Anderson My Jo’.”_

“Ye mean _you_ don’t. Nae taste in literature, you.”

They clearly loved each other very much.

“Let’s get some man’s drink in this lad. He may be a Southern pansy, but I’ll bet he knows the worth of a proper dram.”

Aziraphale, who’d been pinching the pounds too tightly to afford his favourite Glenmorangie, set down his empty pint glass.

“I do.”

* * *

“I watched every one of the period dramas on the telly. _Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre._ When the other boys were watching Doctor Who and the like. It made more sense, and it was a door to escape – we weren’t poor, you know, but Dad didn’t believe in luxuries. It was like living in all the ages of the world.”

“I did always love _Upstairs, Downstairs._ And the Barchester one.”

“So I ended up talking with a BBC accent, and the other boys were always having a go at me for being _posh._ Dad said turn the other cheek, but that one usually already had a scrape on it.”

“Children can be little beasts.”

“I went on to read all the books, too, and well, I’ve really never been able to part with a good book. I’m sorry about all the packing cases.”

“Ha’ ye read the Richard Hannay books?”

“I – ah, never ran across them.”

“Crackin’ good yarns. Bring ye wun. Speakin’ o’ which, that glass looks empty.”

* * *

“So, well, I told him I would have a drink if I liked, and it hurt him but he just said I was grown, and I didn’t exactly come _out_ to him but I think he knew. Only I believe he thought I’d grow out of it. He got me a job with a charity trust that the Army worked with sometimes, but I was always getting a reprimand for arguing with – well, I thought we ought to simply help people who needed it, not be gatekeepers about who’s _deserving._ And, well, one day I just _quit_ , I’d been able to save some money from living at home, and got my ear pierced and went to school for bodywork.”

“You said he made you take the earring out.”

“I know, it was an odd hill to die on. But it was take it out or move out, he was adamant that the rest of the family not see me _looking like that,_ and I wasn’t able to make rent just then – so.”

“Is he still living?”

“I suppose. For a while I’d go back at Christmas and Easter, but, well – by that time my sister’d had her two, and I’d met Cyril, and well, no one ever called to ask once I'd stopped.“

Tracy patted his hand. “You can’t change people’s minds, love. But sometimes they change on their own. You've still got time.”

“Ye changed mine.”

“Old bear.”

* * *

“Now this’s a twenty-five year old Speyside. They keep it fuir me under the bar, but tonight’s a special night.”

“Oh dear. That’s simply divine.”

“You’re perspiring, ducks -- all right there?”

“Never better. So, anyway, Cyril and I lasted about two years – but he was very, well, adventurous, actually was the one who _insisted_ I come out to the parents, I really hate it when people make it an _issue_ , and then he turned round and wanted me to. Urrrm. Do things. With other men. It really wasn’t on.”

“Oh, ducks. I’ve had a few like that. You can tell when the other one’s just suffering through it.”

“So – well, you can always go to the clubs, but the music’s awful and the drink is worse, and I’m really not that much of a catch – “

“Now you stop that right this minute, Aziraphale Fell.”

Tracy became rather imperious on the third thing-with-an-umbrella-in-it. He wasn’t sure what they were, but she’d been stretching them out.

“I’m used to gentlemen minding me, so you listen. You are _absolutely_ a catch.”

The single malt was starting to annihilate his vocabulary and he chose to simply stare.

“You know we all call you Angel because there’s a special thing you do. It’s not just that you’re a good physio.”

“I try to be.” Not even making the formal protest. Was he on his fifth, or sixth?

“I’m on the wrong side of sixty, and some people would call me a wicked woman. Gina’s got that bad arm from the stroke, and the husband upped and left her after, like they do. But you make us feel like pretty girls, and cared about, and like we’ve a right to kindness. Like what you said about not stopping to ask who’s _deserving_.” It was true, he could see the good to be protected and encouraged in everyone, except for himself. “Now you just imagine you’re on your own table.”

“Oh, I often _have._ You can’t imagine what it’s like looking for someone who can get through all this – “ He clapped both hands to his well padded flanks. A fork hit the floor, somewhere.

“There you go. _Exactly_ what I mean. You wouldn’t let me get away with saying I’d lost my figure, would you?”

“Well, you haven’t.”

“Gammon. You ought to’ve seen how long it took me to lace into the old leather pinnie the other night.”

Shadwell spat an expensive mouthful into his palm. “Nae tellin’ tales out’ve school, wumman!”

“So treat yourself the same way you’d treat us. Look at Anthony, he fancies you something chronic.”

It was Aziraphale’s turn to curb a spit again. “Ah – I think he just flirts.” _I expected something I guess I shouldn’t’ve._ “And, well, we work together.”

“And you’re not going to live forever.”

“You two found each other _,_ and how long did that take?” A good bodyworker knows how to turn a conversation that’s going the wrong way. “Have you set a date?”

“Well, it depends on what we decide on for a honeymoon – it'll be a quiet affair, I've dressed up enough in my life -- one of them actually wanted a wedding dress, you know. The Sergeant wants to go to Islay, and I was thinking of Leamington, but of course now I’ve got you – “

“To keep, dear lady. In your spare room, in fact.”

“I’ll get ye another, laddie.”

“Your sleeve’s in the cabbage – “

“Oh bother – “

“I’ve got some Vanish at home, you can’t think how much of that I’ve gone through over the years – “

“Ye’re family now, laddie. Drink up.” Shadwell almost succeeded in an attempt to clink glasses. “An’ if anyone ever gives you a hard time. I have a crack corps of secret operatives who’ll dig up somethin’ on ’em. I’ve made the same offer to young Anthony there.”

“Oh ducks, now I know it’s time to go home. Same time Friday, then?

He was pretty sure he agreed, though he couldn’t quite remember it.

* * *

Aziraphale got through his first session without betraying the fact that the room was still moving around, but caught Crowley watching him with amusement as he swallowed coffee from Bea’s office urn like a medicinal dose.

“Should’ve warned you ‘bout drinkin’ with Shadwell. Hold your head if you need it.”

“Already managed all that,” said Aziraphale feelingly.

“Wondered how he’d be about you movin’ in with Trace. He’s a fey old bugger.”

“Well, he’s already offered me the protection of a secret army.”

“Oh well, if he did that, you’re in. Welcome to an exclusive club.”

It seemed they could, in fact, be friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Virtually all my transcribed Scots accents owe a mighty debt to John Buchan, who set two novels in Glasgow and whose Gorbals Die-Hards make the Baker Street Irregulars look like a troop of Cub Scouts. Shadwell here betrays a reverence for his body of work.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sister Mary vogues. Gabriel's an arse. There's history between him and Bea, it's just not clear what. Meanwhile, Aziraphale eats oysters. They have, as he remarks, a reputation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit longer than previous chapters, but I hope I've made it worthwhile.
> 
> CW for a moment of pretty blatant homophobia/transphobia from a predictable direction.

Text from gsennet to adamyoung [secure phone]:

_You were missed at the morning prayer again. It is certainly not required, but I would like to be able to mention devoutness in your letters of recommendation._

Text from adamyoung to gsennet:

_Very sorry. Up late filling in applications._

Text from Hellspawn to AJC:

_Got chewed out for missing the temperance meeting [rolled eye emoji]_

Reply from AJC to Hellspawn:

_Then my work here is done_

Text from strangedevice to handsoflight4004

_I got the Dancing Hermaphrodite, the Devil reversed, and the Ace of Cups_

Reply from handsoflight4004 to strangedevice:

_I would be agog if I knew what that meant._

Text from strangedevice to handsoflight4004:

_I’ll write it down so as not to influence you and we’ll check in next week_

Reply from handsoflight4004 to strangedevice:

_Just tell me it doesn’t mean another hangover like the last one._

Sister Mary was back, much to Aziraphale’s annoyance. He’d just come into the front for a bit of light and air, and couldn’t leave again without making the snub more pointed than he cared to.

“Between engagements, darling,” Crowley swanned as Aziraphale stepped out from the hallway, with a deprecating gesture of his hand.

“It is a bit slow for a Friday.” Iris was seated at the manicure station, gluing minute glass gems on her own nails.

“No, I was asking _Miss Annie_ who she’s seeing just now. Inquiring minds want to know.”

“I’m sure we don’t.”

“Ooooh, pissy, pissy. What about you, Mister Man with the pronouns? Is there a special someone?”

“I haven't had time for a personal life in a while. I'm working rather a lot right now.”

Sister Mary struck the pose of a mariner scanning the far horizon, turning in a half circle.

“I see nary a ship approaching port.”

“Perhaps not right at this _instant – ”_

“You're not making an _effort_. Sister Annie can barely keep up with the old dears and their comb-outs, and _she_ still falls in and out of love half a dozen times a year. The exhilaration, the drama, the breakups, the anguish! The sheer number of Cosmopolitans it takes us to see her through it!”

“Sister Annie has renewed her dedication to her vows.” said Crowley. “From now on my devotion is reserved for the Most Holy.” He crossed himself – in Aziraphale’s general direction, uncomfortably enough.

“Oh, that must've _hurt,”_ said Mary. “Worse than treading sacred ground.”

Iris sputtered. It seemed a good time to turn and go.

“Gettin’ a little long in the back there, angel.”

It was true. There hadn’t really been a day when going back to his old barber fit in, somehow, and he was starting to toss his hair out of his face while he worked.

“Do you while we’ve both got a slack hour. Still owe you.”

“Oh, _do_ her. Can we watch?”

“I really – “

“Aw, let him.” Iris held her sparkly nails up into the light.

Aziraphale wasn’t sure exactly how, but he found himself at the hairdressing station, draped. Half reclined. He’d been on his feet for the last three days and most of this morning, and it was easy to close his eyes.

“The bergamot shampoo, bit’ve volume. And _just_ a touch of product. Those curls don’t need much help.”

When had someone else washed his hair? The long fingers worked the back of his neck _(imagine you’re on your own table)_ and his temples. The spray was tranquilizing. The chattery voices receded into the vague echoing space that surrounds you when you’re more than half asleep. He could allow himself this, couldn’t he? A touch that wasn’t a cheek-kiss from a powdery woman of a certain age, the ritual handshake of a new client.

The towel was toasty out of the warmer. He caught himself humming with pleasure, bit the sound back.

The unexpectedly sensual rake of a rat-tail comb across his scalp, unusually slow and considering. Well, Anthony hadn’t done this for him before. The tines of the comb sliding through his fine hair, lifting it, the faint biting sound of the shears.

This had been a bad idea. He shifted in the chair.

“Just like candyfloss. We’ll use some mousse, stiffen you up a little ‘fore we’re done.”

The phrasing was a bit unfortunate.

“There we are, just _blow_ you a little first – “

Sister Mary’s splutter coincided with the chime of the door. There was a shuffle and clank of some falling implement at the manicure station.

“Oh, Mr. Sennet, I’ll just be a moment clearing this up – “

“Reading matter while you wait,” said Sister Mary. Aziraphale could see her in the mirror, extending a Pride leaflet with a flourish; a still-gloved hand taking the rainbow-coloured handbill, crumpling it, tossing it straight into the wastebasket beside the hairdressing station. For a moment his eyes met the reflection of a cold, assessing violet gaze that seemed to file him alongside Crowley's balletic posture with the hairdryer, the sheaf of leaflets still in Mary's hand.

"Don't be cruel to a heart that's true," pouted Mary.

“I’ll go say hello to Mz. Damien until Iris is ready.”

His voice dropped as he passed Mary, but not so low that Aziraphale could miss a last venomous word: “ _Catamite.”_

Expensive Italian shoes clacked back toward Bea’s office.

“Well,” managed Sister Mary after several seconds, in a voice that was simultaneously arch and quavery. “ _She_ must be on her period.”

Crowley started up the hand dryer.

* * *

“She’s _lovely._ What’ll your name be in the Order, then? Sister Azahara? That means _orange blossom._ White, fragrant, sultry.”

Sister Mary had recovered her poise. Letting her ruffle his newly trimmed hair seemed a necessary courtesy.

“Aziraphale’s just Angel. Tracy says so,” Crowley was clearing up the hairdressing station, back turned, inflection subdued.

“Oh, and Tracy sees Beyond The Veil. So she must be right.”

“Ah, she gave most've that up when she gave up the game.”

“Good,” said Aziraphale. “I’ve already got one person in my life who tells my fortune.”

“Ask them to tell you your fate in love then! And give us a call if you want to join.” She stuffed an actual business card in his hand, printed with _Sr. Mary Loquacious, LBSW_ (whatever that was), _Chattering Order of St. Beryl, A Mission of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence._ He found himself tucking it into the pocket of his scrubs just as Gabriel Sennet emerged and sat down at the manicure station.

“Toodle _pip,_ darlings,” said Mary, jangling her way out.

* * *

Aziraphale had just loaded the washer and was headed for Bea’s office to wave goodnight when Crowley’s voice stopped him. There was no play or mockery in it, just that echo of a Lowland burr.

“It’s one thing if that metrosexual plonker wants to slag _me_ off. Mary doesn’t need that.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Everyone 'round here was good enough for ‘im when he was standin’ for local Council. _You_ were good enough for ‘im. Before he moved out to West Bouncybollocks where no one knew his pompous arse, so he could be a _Member.”_

A loud sigh. “Yeah, he’s a wanker. But we go back, and I owe him.”

“And I owe _you,_ and I’ll still call you on your shite.”

“I’ll talk to him. He’s been stressed.”

“Well, maybe that’s what happens when you go all in for Brexit and then people realize they’ve been fucked in the arse.”

“Go home and work it off, Snakehead. Water your plants. Buff your car. Relax in a bath, or something.”

Aziraphale managed to look as if he were obliviously returning from the laundry alcove to his workspace when Crowley caught up with him.

“C’mon, angel. Pub night. Let’s go get outside a pint.”

* * *

Tracy and Shadwell were already holding down their usual table.

“Oh, Mr. Fell, don’t you look sharp.”

“I’ll get,” said Crowley, the first words he’d uttered since leaving the shop. It wasn’t lost on Aziraphale that when he came back to the table and handed off a pint of stout, he had a short tumbler of whisky for himself.

“Long day, loves?”

“No worse than usual. That MP of Bea’s was a bit tiresome.”

“He was an arse to Mary and we’re done talkin’ about it.” Half the tumbler went down in a swallow. Aziraphale didn’t miss the brief touch of Tracy’s hand on the fingers that held it.

“Oh, look, they’ve got oysters.”

Every so often the Globe and Star got in a special to fill out the usual menu of shepherds’ pie and ploughman’s, and tonight it was Pacific oysters. He’d been chopping down the balance on his NatWest card. It seemed worth the splurge. “Unnatural victuals,” said Shadwell. “Gi’ me bangers and mash any day.”

“Absolutely traditional. Do you know they’ve been cultivated in Britain since Roman times? Of course it’s too late in the spring for the _Native_ oysters but – ”

“Don’t get Mr. Michelin Guide here started on the history of snot-on-a-shell.”

“Philistine. I am _absolutely_ having some.”

“Are you sure, dear? Is it do or don't eat them in months with an 'r'?”

“Perfectly safe. I think a dozen to start.”

“Well, I _did_ offer to hold your head. Might have to deliver on it.” Tracy’s elbow snapped up into Crowley’s, jostling his tumbler: “ _Cheek!”_

“And perhaps a glass of Riesling, if they’ve got such a thing.”

“Mixin’ your drinks too. Should’ve left your hair long so I c’n hang on better.” Crowley raised an admonitory finger. “Tell you what, angel, I am going to make you a bet that you cannot eat those things. If you can, I’ll pay for ’em.”

“You have already lost.”

“See ‘bout that.” Crowley swung up to the bar with even more swivel in his stride than usual, taking the tumbler with him.

The oysters, when they arrived, were nestled in crushed ice and surrounded by fronds of rocket and wedges of lemon. Shadwell took over the pint of stout. They’d had a Riesling on ice which was probably Tesco’s finest, but it would do.

“They look like bloody _organs,_ angel.”

Aziraphale primly lifted a lemon wedge and made a show of squeezing out a precise number of drops.

“Ah, now you’re just poncin’.”

“Well, since this is apparently a _performance.”_

Shadwell visibly shuddered as the first oyster, worried free with a two-tined fork, slid out of the briny shell and past his lips. The little hum, the protrusion of his tongue-tip to catch the last drop of lemony brine, were only partly deliberate.

“One down.”

Aziraphale picked up another wing-shaped shell, lifted an eyebrow at Crowley.

“Sure you won’t have a try?”

“You’re eatin’ the whole lot, or bet’s off.”

“Suit yourself. Oh, splendid.”

“Don’t _stare_ so, Anthony, you’ll put him off. That’d be cheating.”

“ _Nothing_ could put me off these.” Aziraphale raised a hand with a small sigh. “Transcendent.”

“I’m gettin’ a plate’ve somethin’ normal,” said Shadwell, largely, it seemed, for an opportunity to rise.

“I suppose I might try if you put something like HP on them.”

“Sacrilege, dear lady. Though a bit of shallot mignonette wouldn’t be out of place.”

“Back in a tick, don’t let him slip any’ve those under the table – “

“Get me another too, there’s a love – “

“ ‘nother for you, angel?”

Aziraphale was absorbed in his fifth oyster and didn’t answer. Crowley brought one anyway.

* * *

“And really, it was an immediately acquired taste – nothing against Sunday roast or meat pie, I was raised that way, but it was such a large, dazzling world – “

“Oh ducks, I’ve seen it when people discover _pleasure_.”

“Keep him honest while I’m in the loo.”

“I’m on the last, but, you know, I could do with another.”

Crowley apparently heard that, because he returned presently with a second plate, and another glass, and took out his mobile. “How d’ye spell Guinness?”

“Oh, dear, this is nothing like a record. I believe that was over two hundred.”

“You set it?”  
  
Tracy finally, cautiously, dipped a finger in the brine and touched it to her lips.

“Oh dear, that tastes like – “ Her eyes widened and she stifled a snort.

“Well. They do have the reputation. Though I think it’s a folk tale.”

 _“Do_ tell, angel.”

“You are being deliberately obtuse.”

“Posh boy.”

“Street Arab.”

Crowley’s expression went blank for a moment and a little wary – it might have just been whisky going the wrong way – and then the grin was back.

“Not takin’ my eyes off you. Finish ’em all.”

“Game _on,_ darling.”

* * *

“Oh, dear, I really should get this round.”

“I’m fine, dear, third umbrella’s my limit – “

“Ah, that’s how y’count ’em.”

“Oh bother. I’ve left my wallet. And my keys are on it, it's the kind with a ringy thingy.”

“Likely story.”

“No, I always tuck it in the cupboard when I work. Doesn’t do to have something banging against your leg.”

“Hm, tell me more about that.”

“I can pay you back tomorrow.”

“It’s all right, ducks, I think we’ll call it a night. The Sergeant’s gone to sleep.” A sizable plate of bangers and mash had put Shadwell into a mild food coma.

“Got the key, ’s on my way home. Walk you.”

Tracy pulled Aziraphale’s sleeve as he rose.

“I’ll stay at the Sergeant’s for the night. Just in case that matters.”

* * *

“ _Bloody hell,_ who left that pulled out – “

“You did, I think.”

“Get a light – “

“Ouch!”

“Steady, angel – “

“I think that last glass was a bit much.”

“Need the loo?”

“No, I just – “

“Good.”

There was no light in the hall but the faint glimmer from the emergency lamp by the fire door, and Aziraphale scented Crowley before he saw, the close waft of sandalwood and whisky and a day’s sweat, and felt breath up against his lips.

“You’re gonna make me crazy.”

“Crowley.”

“ _Anthony_.”

His hands rose to a midsection almost lean enough for them to encircle. Had he decided to do that? Neither of them were sober enough to stay steady with feet this close together, and they both swayed as Crowley found his mouth and pulled him in.

“Fuck me, it does taste like spunk.”

“That wouldn’t be the best way to find out.”

“Tart. Give us some more.”

Tongue sweeping more deeply over his own, retreating to flick over his lips as if searching for last phantom drops of brine, unmistakable heat and hardness against his leg. He pulled back a moment, breath hitching.

“Ah – Anthony. This is nice but – “

The wall met his back so quickly he had no actual sense of moving toward it. Crowley’s hands were wound in his jacket, trapping his shoulders with unexpected, wiry strength.

“Nice,” he almost hissed. “I’m not _nice_. I’m a needy” (suddenly there was a hand splayed over his stomach under the scrub top, as hot and dry as he remembered), “ _greedy_ gay disaster” (the scent of his hair, dangling over Aziraphale’s own flushed-feeling cheeks, tickling his ear) “and I’ve wanted you since the day you walked in here. Can’t stop thinkin’ about your arse in those tight little scrubs. Havin’ your hands on me.”

He wolfed Aziraphale’s mouth again, bit along his cheek, breathing into the shell of his ear, down the hollow of his throat. “You were hard for me before. I could feel you.” (And he was again, achingly, nothing like the polite itch of a fading dream, nothing like _business to take care of._ He was arching up against Crowley’s thigh, shoulders still braced against the wall, fingers twisted in the sleek skin-tight shirt under the skinny jacket, the last fading voice that said _this is a very bad idea_ drowning in Riesling and recklessness.)

“Wanted to feed you those bloody awful oysters. Feed you Tracy’s cakes and listen to you moan. Feed you somethin’ else and find out what kind’ve sound you’d make.”

Aziraphale realized he was certainly making some sort of sound. There weren’t words in it.

“Dream about it. Want to wreck you. Want to see your mouth red from sucking my cock. Take you home and spoil you and ruin you for anyone else.”

The grip on his shoulders loosened a little, and for a moment there were only the mingled sounds of their breathing in the stillness. Crowley’s mobile vibrated ridiculously against his leg, and Crowley thumbed it to voicemail without bothering to look.

“No,” said Aziraphale, and as Crowley began to stiffen and draw back he went on “right here,” and then his hands were in the long hair and he was sucking Crowley’s tongue as if it were the only thing keeping him alive. One of the pictures on the passage wall fell down. That hideous still life. Good.

“Better not forget my wallet – “

The salt lamp was still on. Desert-hot hands dipped under his scrub top again as he bent to the cupboard, pulled him against bony hips. _Right here._ He wanted it to happen, dirty and sudden, before he lost his nerve and found the voice that said _we mustn’t_ and _we work together_ and _I like you very much but._ The drawstring of his scrub trousers loosened at a long-fingered tug. Hands kneading him through his underpants, sliding around to pull him back tight.

“Like it like this?”

“Oh God, yes, but – “

“Direct assumption into Heaven.”  
  
“I haven’t got anything – “

A small crinkling sound. “No worries. Stopped by the gents’ at the Star, ‘member. Full service establishment. Just had a feeling.”

Teeth nipping the back of his neck. “Figured you could manage the. Ah. _Lubrication_ part.”

Aziraphale started at the feel of Crowley’s hand reaching around his thick midsection, dipping into his pants.

“Already givin’ it your all.” Wet and slick, gliding under a wicked thumb, there hadn’t been a hand other than his own on his cock in so long he’d forgotten what it felt like.

“Just – careful – can’t use oil, perishes the rubber – I've got an oil free cream for facials – “

Snort.

“Not _that_ kind.”

Crowley reaching around him to feel his way over the shelf.

“And that’s Biofreeze, whatever you do, don’t use that.”

“What’s in it?”

“Double menthol and ilex."

"Ouch."

"Here.”

The spit of a pump top working, a slow slide down his girth, the heat of that hand radiating through the cool cream.

“Hidden treasure, angel. Who knew.”

Aziraphale worked his hand back between them, fumbled at a metal button, the top of a zip.

“Art to this. Wait a mo’.”

“I wondered how you got out of those.”

“Quickly’s possible.”

Crowley’s hands returned to yank the scrubs down far enough that Aziraphale could step out of one leg. It didn’t seem as if the jeans had gotten further than Crowley’s ankles, but he slotted them back together, rubbing slowly.

“Feel as good as I thought you would.”

Stumbling a little, Aziraphale swiveled, dropped elbows to the end of the table ( _imagine you’re on your own table)_ , pulling a half-hobbled Crowley with him. It was a solid hardwood one with no wobble, and he’d left it ready for the morning, flannel sheets turned down, a half-moon cushion at knee level. He pulled it awkwardly down to the foot of the table. Just the right height.

Sharp teeth met lightly at the small of his back, moved down for another nip and another, a hot stripe of sensation as Crowley’s tongue moved along his cleft.

“ _God,_ that’s nasty.”

“Yeah, that’s why you’re leakin’ all over me.” The hand around his cock was still moving lazily, and he could barely stop himself from thrusting into it, but not yet, don’t let it be over.

“Don’t – not too fast – “

“All right.” Another sputtering noise from the shelf, and then a slow, hold-your-breath parting of him, a slide against someplace almost unbearably sensitive. “Won’t go too fast.”

Nor did it. He was opening as gradually as a chrysalis, remembering how to take a lover, encircle him, accept him. Too long, far too long. The little stretch and turn of two fingers, _he knows what he’s doing_ , so did Aziraphale, he’d surprised people before, people looking at the wide blue eyes and cherub cheeks and diffident manner and getting the oh so very wrong impression.

“Like that, don’t you.”

He clenched needily on the working fingers, rocking a little, aching for more and relishing the ache. A little tease around his loosened opening as the fingers left, a thick spatter as another pump of cream hit the floor.

“Makin’ a mess, ‘fraid.”

“Then make it count.”

Slow, unctuous deep gliding, and then, oh, he’d forgotten how it could burn too, but it was _good,_ and he pushed into it, feeling Crowley go still.

“Christ, angel, you’re gonna make me come like a kid. Glove 'n' all.” Breath fluttered audibly in his throat, hummingbird wings. “Don’t dare move.”

“Then I will,” said Aziraphale, and pushed back off the table, flat-footed, working himself on what ceased rapidly to be a burn and became only fullness and sweet violation. Crowley’s hands braced against the table on either side of him. He felt his knees give way just as a cry next to his ear startled him, Crowley pulsed hard inside him, pushing him over his own edge, _never did that together before._

He became aware of the fleece blanket tickling his cheek, dampness under him, Crowley’s face in his hair.

“Oh, angel. Wanted you so much. Every day.” The tracery of lips over the back of his neck was as soft and tentative as their movements had been violent only moments before. “Love you.”

\-- _what --_

The light in the hallway snapped on, a wedge of light knifing under the door.

“Who’s there?”

It was Bea, and it sounded as if Adam were with them. Crowley muffled a snort against his neck, breathing the words soundlessly: “Oh _shit.”_

Scrubs somewhere on the floor. Yanked up, halfway tied.

“Ah – it’s only me, Bea. Anthony threw out his back again leaving the pub. Just offered to fix it.”

A silence that was just a little too long.

“Right then. Had stuff on my mind, forgot to lock up the back. Called to ask if Anthony had, didn’t get an answer. Thought someone got in.”

“Oh, someone _did,”_ breathed Crowley.

“Shh.”

Aziraphale put his head out the door.

“Sorry to frighten you. We’ll sort it.”

“Broken glass out here?”

“Ah – couldn’t find the light switch. I”ll sweep up.”

“All right. See you in the morning.”

They waited until the fire door huffed closed before disintegrating in weeping laughter.

“Oh, God – your _face – “_

“Do you imagine I fooled them?”

“With that in your hair?”

At some point Crowley must have gripped the curls at his temple with a cream-slick hand. He scrubbed at it with the corner of the top sheet; after a considering moment, dug under the table for a towel and pushed it toward Crowley, daubing at himself with another.

“I’ll just start a fresh load before we go.”

Another sputter of laughter. “Give's just a moment, won’t y'?”

The slow churn and whir of the washer reminded him there was a real world. Sore and joyful, he wondered how to make his way back into it.

“Reckon you burned up all those oysters," said Crowley. "Let’s go find something we can both eat.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning, this is the first of three sweet chapters in a row before we take a hard left down a rough road for four more. Pinky-swear there's a happy ending, with more silliness, the sun literally shining on everyone, and a very special smile.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale can make coffee if he has to, but he's better with tea. Bea has strong views, not about coffee.

The light wasn’t right. Maybe he’d slept too late, when was his first today? He scrabbled for the phone on the bedside table, only the bedside table wasn’t there. And he really must have had a good deal to drink at the pub, he’d fallen into bed without his pyjamas –

There was a snore just behind his ear. Oh.

He took a moment to register a delicious soreness, a scent that didn’t owe anything either to oysters or to the spa’s bergamot shampoo.

It came back, slowly. Realizing they couldn’t wait through a sit-down meal before getting their hands back on one another. Bringing takeaway back to Crowley’s because it was closest, eating it standing in a kitchen full of hanging plants and potted aloe cactuses; leaving the half-empty cardboard containers on the sideboard in the rush to get to a bedroom that was all minimalist planes and muted, dark colours. Crowley taking him again where he was already slack and open, this time with his heels up on the bony shoulders, thick thighs pressed back against the pillow of his stomach, Crowley slipping a finger into his mouth for him to suck on hungrily. _Just wanted to see if my prick’s arrived._ It was _filthy,_ and it made him shudder and bear down, pulling a sound out of Crowley that was worth the faint twinge he felt now as he levered himself up to sit on the edge of the bed.

There’d been a little more wine, in the bath after, a small tub where they took turns -- Aziraphale using the lather to thumb and wring Crowley’s always-tight shoulders, Crowley using it for less professional forms of friction. He didn’t remember falling asleep, but the dressing-gown he found puddled under his feet as he stood rang a bell.

He pulled it on – it would just tie around him – and padded out to the kitchen, where, unsurprisingly, there was one of those sleek stainless steel coffeemakers that looked as if it ought to have a tachometer. There was also, fortunately, an ordinary Oxo kettle, and a bashed box of teabags in the back of one cupboard.

Crowley hadn’t changed position, but made a wordless noise and rolled to face him as he sat down on the bed again.

“Coffee tropism. I ought to’ve expected.”

The kiss was soft, slow and sweet, the little prickle of morning stubble exactly what he wanted to feel. Something that meant he was in Crowley’s space, privileged to see and touch something other than the curated posturing of _Miss Annie._

“Settlin’ in already, I see.”

“It only took me three tries.”

Crowley elbowed up to take his cup, the sheet falling away to show a lazy, here-if-you-need-me erection already starting against his thigh. He sucked down half the cup in two gulps.

“Oi, you’re hired.”

Relaxed, no longer _performing_. Aziraphale realized with a rush of tenderness that he wasn’t just helplessly attracted to this man, he _liked_ him –

[ _love you_ ]

– wanted to learn him, share ordinary things with him. He felt inexplicably like home, like someone to come home _to_ , badger about his foibles. Surprise with small kindnesses. All the things he’d been raised to believe that he

[ _our sort’ve folk_ ]

couldn’t hope for, didn’t deserve.

He pushed pillows into a pile against a gray-stained headboard.

“See y’found the tea. Dunno how long it’s been in there. Can’t even remember what kind I got.”

“PG Tips,” said Aziraphale with his best tragic inflection. “But it’ll do for my purposes.”

He sipped a hot mouthful, shut his eyes for a moment, swallowed.

“You mentioned something you wanted to see last night.”

Crowley gasped and then made a less definable noise as Aziraphale closed his mouth over what was becoming a more conspicuous display of interest.

“Oh _buggery.”_

“Really? I felt like a change.”

“Just enough’ve a bastard, you are.”

“I hope so.”

Crowley did have a nightstand on his side – what it meant that there wasn’t a second tantalized him, file that away for later – and he took the near-empty coffee cup before the remains could spill and set it down carefully, followed it with his own. Crowley in the morning light was a sight for an artist, all bones and planes, the dark copper hair on his arms and chest flecked with gold where the strengthening sun hit it. Aziraphale brushed lips over the haloes around small dark nipples, followed a narrow trail down slowly past his navel. Fingers drew gentle circles in his own short curls.

“Def should’ve left it long. Can’t think what came over me.”

“I can.”

“The mouth on you.”

“You’ve no idea. Yet.”

Another gulp of the tea, the gratifying pulse as Crowley hardened all the way inside his mouth. He held him there until the heat faded, slid back to kiss the smooth head softly, draw designs with his tongue on a velvety shaft.

“Nice of you to get something in just my size.”

“Got it – ah – special. Bloody hell, angel, didn’t know I had anything left in me. Hasn’t been like this since.” The sentence truncated there, supplanted by a hissing-in of breath.

“Dear, you’re. Mm. Young and vigourous. I’m sure you’ll quite wear me out.”

“Make it a project.”

The warm weight of his balls, more of that crinkly, red-gold fur. He could feel Crowley wanting to thrust into his mouth, deliberately slowed his movements, lifted away to stroke lazily with his hand.

“I think Scottish Breakfast is going to become my preferred brew.”

“Ah, caught that, did y’?”

“Comes. Mmm. Out when you’re angry.”

“Growin’ up in Glasgow.” He pronounced it something closer to _Glesga._ “Born stroppy. Have t’ learn manners, y’know, fuir the Sassenach.”

“Shadwell hasn’t.”

Not letting the movements get too rhythmic yet. A long trace of his tongue back up to circle a plump slit.

“Yon’s a mannerless numpty wha’ canna’ behave proper, but Tracy thinks 'e’s braw, sae good enough.”

“Mmmm. Talk like that some more.”

“Oot a’ practice, angel.”

“Couldn’t tell it last night.”

“Fuck me, angel, you’re good.”

“We’ll get there.” Lips sliding all the way back down to the base of the shaft now, tickled by the crisp curls, willing his throat to accept the pressure against it. Gliding the backs of his nails in parallel along the strings of a long thigh, pressing Crowley's knee up to open him, moving back to his centre.

“ _Would_ you enjoy having me in here? I think you would.”

It wasn’t clear whether the sound Crowley made was a response to what he’d said, or what he was doing.

“I'm more partial to the. Ah. Receptive role, but I pride myself on being versatile. We’ll take it under advisement. For now, just this.”

A blurry memory of the night before, nightstand drawer, thank you very much, there we are. Crowley groaned, bucked up into his mouth as a single blunt finger sank in.

“Christ, angel, close – ‘ve seen what you can swallow but ’s’been months since I been tested, not askin’ you to take me on faith – “

“Quite rightly. All in due time.” The other hand quickly and clumsily slicked too, wrapping a wood-hard shaft, making a tight space to thrust into. The only part of Crowley that wasn’t lean and stringy was the soft pad just below his navel, where the knotwork pattern of amber hair spread toward the creases of his groin. Aziraphale trapped the sudden spurt, the pulse and ebb of his cock against it.

He didn’t quite expect to be pulled up by arms stronger than they looked, folded in a rib-cracking embrace. Something to be said for padding. Was that a tear against his cheek? Sometimes his eyes watered when he was barely awake. He felt Crowley’s breathing slow.

“Take care’ve you, angel.”

“Dear, I’d love nothing more. But I think we’re barely going to get in to work, you know, allowing time to wash up. And a bit of breakfast. Is there a place we can stop? I looked in your fridge. There’s not a thing there that’s in date.”

* * *

They entered a few minutes apart, fooling, Aziraphale suspected, exactly no one. His scrubs were hopelessly wrinkled, but he kept a spare set folded in the cupboard. The looks he exchanged with Crowley throughout the day, the little hand touches, the quick kiss snatched behind the door of his workroom, were surely entirely discreet. It took Bea until three-thirty to corner him in back, where he’d gone out the fire door to chuck a bin bag into the skip.

“”Fell.” Not _Az._ He stopped mid-stride.

“Need to say something.”

He nodded _yes._

“Just saying. Nothing to do with keeping your job or losing it. I don’t work that way.”

He held their eyes. He hadn’t noticed before how brightly blue they were, brighter than his own, all wrong for the flat harsh black of their hair.

“Sometimes it works out for people and sometimes it doesn’t. I get that. That’s why I quit all that crap years ago.”

[ _you were good enough for ‘im_ ]

“All I’m telling you is? It might work out for _you_ two and it might not. That’s life. But if you fuck him up? If you don’t treat him right? I will personally kill you.”

He had, in that moment, absolutely no doubt whatsoever that they would.

“We understand each other?”

He nodded again. They turned and walked back inside, five feet and a hundred pounds of implacability in a frayed suit.

So. No pressure.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a honeymoon, lacking only a wedding to precede it. Aziraphale has opinions about bedlinens and behaviour. There's some electricity between Anathema's shop and the one next door. A little of Bea's story comes to light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't resist giving Anathema a crescent boline. It seemed to make more sense than a breadknife.

It was, Aziraphale thought, a little like being drunk all the time, except you weren’t. You could certainly count backwards from a hundred, you showed up for things (mostly) on time, you didn’t walk into doorframes or do sloppy work. (If anything, his work was becoming more adroit, more focused, as if his hands really could see and know what to do without any need for conscious thought.)

But everything had that luminous, weightless quality the world acquired when he’d had a pint, or enjoyed most of the first glass of Pinot Gris with a perfect supper: life was good, there was nothing to worry about any more, everything had been fixed. He knew that with the wine or lager it was illusory, everything would still be there in the morning, but it was still a respite worth the long-ago defiance of his father, a joy that he couldn’t imagine a kind God proscribing.

Now, though, it didn’t end. He’d wake up – in his own bed, stretching and rested, thinking _I’ll see him in a few hours;_ or in Crowley’s, turning lazily into an embrace that sealed them together from shoulder to ankle, _I have you._ He didn’t say as much. He’d never said things like that easily.

Fucking stood in for words. They behaved themselves at work, if you didn’t count kisses that were promises of _when we get back to yours_ , slotted between phrases of overly animated dialogue in the laundry alcove or behind his half-closed door, _your shoulders are like rocks, here, I’ve got a moment._ Once they were off the clock it was almost physical pain to keep their hands off one another until there was a door that they _could_ shut behind them.

One morning he found a sticky note tucked into his tearaway calendar ( _Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Days of Crosswords,_ he’d not caught up in a while) scribbled with a phrase that would mean nothing to anyone else, but sent a flush south of his scrubs' waistband when he remembered the last time he’d heard it. Crowley kept a little desk diary by his workstation, reminders to nudge customers about their touch-ups or place an order, and Aziraphale bought a packet of the gummed notes to slip return messages into it. _Missed you last night,_ or _I need a new mark._ He remained scrupulous about using the shop’s supplies.

What if Tracy’s expression had become one long nudge and wink, especially when they left pub night early the next week, and the next? What if Iris always knew who he was looking for when he popped out to the shopfront and didn’t see Crowley (“he’s just gone round Boots for a few things”)? He was nearly fifty, and Tracy was wise, she was right, she was a Sibyl and a priestess of venery: he wasn’t going to live forever, and forever wouldn’t be long enough if he did.

He was, unaccountably, shy with Anathema.

“Your aura’s amazing,” she said without preamble as she slid into their usual booth at Cafe Mejana for a lunch date that he’d already cancelled twice. “It’s out to here. Fizzing. You’re not getting enough sleep though.”

True, probably.

“So it’s that redheaded guy? The one with the car and the nephew?”

“Ah. Um. Well we’ve been seeing each other a bit.”

“More than a bit.”

“I’ve been cautious about it, working together, but – “ _Give me your hand a moment, dear, you’ll see exactly what I’ve been thinking about you._ Or, _Angel, hey, Bea’s out, got a minute ‘fore my next?_

“Where else do people meet each other these days? I’m starting to think Newt’s blowing the mains just for an excuse to come over from next door. The breaker’s in my back room.”

“You are never doing sordid things in the electrical closet.”

“Who said anything about _sordid?_ He comes round, he sorts the circuits, he asks me about Wicca. You know I always have a boline on me in case someone gets frisky" -- this was the little crescent-shaped knife that Anathema used for cutting herbs, with what were apparently very specific rituals -- "but he's been a perfect gentleman. I haven’t decided.”

He wanted to say _decide, decide, you were right, Tracy was right,_ but that would be too much like letting her win. He contented himself with picking up an olive the next time she tweaked him about Crowley, stripping the flesh from the pit with sharp little teeth, sucking it clean without breaking eye contact.

Which was as good as telling all, he supposed. He just didn’t have to say it.

He and Crowley managed to jostle their schedules, so they could have a morning in oftener.

“ _Do_ let me. I’ve been chopping down my balance. This is an ordinary king, isn’t it?” Crowley’s bed nearly filled the room, and sometimes they needed that.

“Perfectly good sheets, angel. Matched ’em up when I painted.” Crowley’s hands could manage anything: ageing women’s hair, automotive tools, paintbrushes. Sometimes Aziraphale imagined his body was covered with their signature, layers of invisible fingerpaint that traced every night they’d spent together, every moment they’d snatched in a doorway or lift.

“I only mean you don’t know what Egyptian cotton’s like till you’ve tried it. It’s the sort of thing you learn in my work. And it wears like iron.”

“Mm-hm.” Crowley, burrowing into his belly, was manifestly trying to distract him. The closest they’d come to a quarrel was Crowley scolding him rather affectionately about spending. _Could have the Bentley perfect already if I wanted to be paying it off for another year or two_ , he’d said _. Just get a bit of something every payday._

“You’ve never slept on anything softer.”

“Oh, I _have.”_

Even with known lovers, Aziraphale had always tried to hide the fat that came with treating himself at restaurants and patisseries and vintners after he’d ended it with Cyril _(if no one else will be good to me, I will_ ) – turning just so, undressing in dim light. Pulling up the bedclothes. But Crowley seemed to glory in the soft roll of his stomach, the plump layer of flesh over his chest muscles, deep and broad from years of leaning into the table: kissing, kneading, rubbing with his cheeks like a scent-marking cat. Aziraphale had experience, Lord knew he did, and he’d learned from it (just as he’d learned to choose a wine or a sauce after a childhood of English stodge), but he’d never let that part of his body feel much before. Crowley’s lips, the trailing strands of his hair, were a whole unsuspected vocabulary of lust. Perhaps he would write a lexicon. A rare volume, _The Cipher Of Aziraphale and Anthony._

When those whispering lips found their way home to the base of his belly, almost as if by accident, he’d moan and hum and wait for clever fingers ( _paintbrush, spanner, comb)_ to wrap around him.

“Thick as a brick here, you.”

He hadn’t yet made good on his promise of the first night. Enough lovers had told him he wasn't _small_ , and Crowley seemed so elfin sometimes, so breakable ( _delicate Uncle Anthony will manage the lamps):_ it would be a sacrilege to hurt him. ( _If you don’t treat him right._ ) He loved the stroke of a hand, a tongue, a finger, loved to be taken in and welcomed, and that suited Aziraphale.

“Been trying to. Mm. Encourage you to eat breakfast.”

“Will if you feed it to me.”

“Consider it served.”

He liked watching the clever hands at work on Crowley’s other passion too, the gleaming aluminium and brass and coiling rubber under the hood of the Bentley that lived in the far corner of the car park. “I haven’t the first idea what most of these things are called,” he’d said on the first Sunday afternoon they’d spent puttering with it, _she’s missed me_ , but Crowley just said _I’ll teach you._ He wore his old scrubs for the occasion, the ones that had gotten a bit too oily and stained to look professional, and at least the automotive grease and cleaning compounds overwhelmed their stale-tallow smell.

“Had to hire garage space for the big work, when I got 'er, but now it's just the tweaks," Crowley explained as Aziraphale made a circuit of the gleaming vehicle and hoped his compliments on the work weren't entirely clueless. "Gotta replace a few more've the hoses and rubber bits. That’s what perishes first even if someone treats a car like the Hope Diamond. ‘N’ the safety stuff. Adam’s round next week, we’re putting the seat belts in. Long, fiddly job, took me ages to even figure out how to do it, but Bea's been on at me about it."

“They, ah, seem concerned for you.”

“Ah, we go back a bit.”

“I received, well. A stern warning.”

“Did’je now.”

“I’m on notice to treat you _right.”_  
  
“Y’tell ’em how well you’re treating me, or’ll I?”

Blackened fingertips dug into the white broadcloth of the scrubs, leaving twisted marks. A match for the sweet dusky marks in the hollow of his throat. He’d taken to wearing a shirt and bow tie – he had some old ones from his time at the Trust – under a protective coat at work, making it look even more as if he were impersonating an osteopath or physio, but no one commented (if you didn’t count an eyeroll from Bea, for whom that was close to thirty percent of their expressive repertory).

“Can think of one natural aptitude y’got for this.”

“Whatever would that be?”

“Suck the chrome off a bumper.”

“We are. Ah. Making a spectacle of ourselves.”

They forgot the spanner kit in their hurry to get back inside, and Crowley had to struggle back into jeans and run out barefoot to get it later, after the rain started.

* * *

Hounslow Heath was bigger than he’d realized, and offered a lot of quiet spots where an hour’s conversation could be punctuated with a kiss, a handclasp, even an arm around the shoulders without their making a _spectacle of themselves._ There was a place near the Crane bank where a miscellany of fowl liked to strut, and there was something tranquil about tossing them the remains of a packet of crisps, or the peas Crowley picked out of Indian takeaway (for whatever reason, he hated peas).

“Really they’re that way ‘bout anyone they’ve got history with. Even that prick Sennet, they don’t give up on people easy. Met ’em when I was in my twenties, they were doing some work for a shelter for queer kids. Lot’ve the places back then wouldn’t take enby kids, or trans kids like Mary.”

“So that’s where you know her from.”

“Yeah. We – she’d been on the street, ‘bout all there is for kids like her. I mean, she could’ve wiped off the lipstick and put on khakis and been _Christopher Hodges_ again, but Mary’s a scrapper.”

“Give me the rest of those peas.”

“Anyway Bea’d had something going with Sennet, and then they came out as enby. Reckon they’d always known they were ace, that probably suited Mister Purity down to the ground – “

“I confess I can’t quite keep up with the nomenclature nowadays. I’m not really _au fait_ with genderfluid, and calling people _they_ and so on. “

“It’s pretty simple, angel. You’ll work it out.”

“I grew up hearing just L, G, B, T, I’m afraid. Like the four humours or the points of the compass. Now it seems to run off the page. Is ace anything like AFAB?”

“Well, Bea's both. Assigned Female At Birth. And asexual. They’re really not bothered about it.”

“It seems a bit of a loss.”

“Don’t miss what y’don’t want. Doesn’t mean they don’t care about people. Know it hurt when Mister Member couldn’t handle it. Thinkin’ that didn't make a good enough impression on ‘is arm at the hustings.”

“And yet there he still is. Unfortunately.” The MP still came in every week or two, and the assessing look he gave Aziraphale if they crossed paths left him feeling oddly exposed.

“Like I said, they don’t give up. Maybe he doesn’t either. Some things take hold’ve you.” A long silence. Aziraphale sensed something like the turning of gears, or files collating.

“You wanna get tested?”

Well, _there_ it was.

“I mean. There’s not gonna be someone else. Just sayin’. If you – wanted it to be just us. We could stop – you know, bein’ careful.”

“I’ve – really. I’ve just not had time.”

“Make it?”

Crowley’s arms went unexpectedly around him. He caught himself glancing to one side and another, but it was a chilly spring day, and no one was nearby.

“I’m here for you, only for you.”

_[love you]_

It sounded a little like _will you marry me._

_* * *_

“Tracy’s been telling me I should get back in touch with my family. This isn’t some conspiracy between the two of you, is it?”

“Have I ever told you to do that?”

“I thought it might be something you read in the cards again.”

“The only thing I saw in your cards was that Four of Pentacles again. Caution and holding back. Or maybe you’re still just making up for buying too much wine.”

(He really hadn’t been. There was barely time to drink it. Covering a few rounds in the pub, yes, but getting back to Crowley’s seemed more important, or sleeping hard on the nights he didn’t spend there, the late evenings with a glass and a stack of compact discs taking a long hiatus.)

“I only wondered. Anthony did say she was on at him about it for a while too. I gathered he told her that some things couldn’t be mended, and he was going to choose his own family, _and you are an important part of it, dear lady._ He can be quite gallant.”

“Oh, tell me more of the Chronicles of Anthony. Favourite colour? Favourite dish? Unexpected fact?”

“Black, so far as I can see, unless it’s gunmetal-gray, and vindaloo with the peas all picked out of it, and he carries on lengthy conversations with his plants. They all have names.”

_Favourite place to be touched. Favourite place to kiss me. Favourite way to spoon, wrapped around the long bolster that I got him for his back, with me wrapped around him, because he’s always cold._

“Shampoo? Cologne?”

“Sandalwood – you are _mocking_ me, you minx.”

“Not a bit of it. I just want to know what scent trail to follow if you ever disappear. I was afraid you had there, for a bit.”

“Oh, dear, no, just – “

“I know. Busy.”

* * *

“What about just some chips ‘n’ back to mine? Starting early tomorrow. That Gorgon from the library board. You can sleep in.”

He’d had the key to Crowley’s flat for a couple of weeks now, and it felt as if they were being less obvious when he arrived an hour or two later, clean and correct in the clothes he’d started to keep in one drawer of the mostly empty dresser, the tartan tie Crowley’d bought him (“the sett of Clan Shadwell, aye, I swear it”).

Crowley’s gallantry extended to everyone, in this case chip-shop girls, and there were giggles and flirtations as this one packed chips and breaded fish into cardboard sleeves with those dubious little packets of malt vinegar. _A girl as lovely as you surely has a generous heart, a little extra for my particular friend? He’s had a long day._ Aziraphale shifted nervously as Crowley lifted his hand, sketched a kiss inches away from the knuckles. _And for my own debased tastes, some packets of that salad cream._ Lord knew why he liked to dip chips in it, but he did. _Ta, fair lady, your slave for life. Off we go, darling._

He could tell Crowley caught his wince before making a deliberate point of taking his hand. He took a deep breath and squeezed back.

* * *

“Y’think it’s bad of me to do it.”

He’d been quiet and moody on the walk back, nibbling a chip, trying to keep from wolfing them all before they got

_[home]_

He got quiet sometimes, a little distant, a little thoughtful, and it was like being let into a sacred space, trusted in it, but this was different.

“Do what, dear?”

“Stylin’, like.” Crowley duplicated the pose with which he’d caught up the bag of chips and held it aloft, as if displaying his treasure, before leaving the shop. "You always get that _frowny_ look."

“It’s just not something I do. Making a display.”

“It’s just fooken’ with ’em, angel. ‘N’ it’s like, well, armour. Tells ’em you don’t care what they think.”

His movements as he shut off the taps, propped the last of a couple of days' dishes in the drainer, were a little choppy, a little angry.

“For what it’s worth, she seemed to quite like you.”

“Oh, right, and she’s prob’ly tellin’ some pimply booger right now ‘bout the flamer she had in the shop today. Or you jealous, angel?”

Trying to veer back to lightness. He always did. Maybe that was a good idea.

“You don’t need armour with me, at least.”

Hard to tell if the long intake of breath as he gently pinned Crowley against the kitchen counter was just Anthony trying to calm himself, or something else.

“But I _could_ fuck with you.”

Using _language_ still didn’t come naturally. One simply didn’t, the way he was raised. But he’d noticed that Crowley’s voice always went a little thick with lust when he did it, which was why he did.

“You’ve been giving me a show with that sweet little bum for the past ten minutes. Erotic washing-up.”

The jeans squeezed Crowley’s form so tightly that it was almost impossible to feel his natural shape, but he could sense the heat as he slid a hand along the felled seam between the long legs, dragged it slowly back.

“I think I’d be an absolute _brute_ not to take what was offered.”

He couldn’t have said where it came from. _I pride myself on being versatile._

“Mine, aren’t you?”

He’d learned how to manage that fiddly button, the reluctant zip strained tight over the flat belly. Crowley was already hard, and hot, a little whiff of his intimate scent escaping as Aziraphale freed him. He’d learned, too, the long shudder of breath that always came when he closed his hand loosely around the shaft and stroked, a sound of vague disbelief that echoed his own. He worked the jeans down far enough to feel the hard shape of that muscled arse, greedy for that perfection, still amazed that it was his to touch.

“Want to tell everyone you’re mine, show me then.”

He felt Crowley grasping what he meant, setting his feet apart as far as the jeans would allow, leaning forward over the sink, the way Aziraphale had leaned on that first night in his work room.

“If I remember, you keep _supplies_ in that third drawer.” Because they’d fucked in every room in the flat, and little pillows of lubricant and condoms [ _he’s just gone round to Boots for a few things]_ fit into odd corners, so that if they didn’t want to leave the big beanbag chair that was the only one Crowley could seem to sit in comfortably, if they wanted to, ahem, vary the dinner menu a bit, well, mischief managed.

He slicked his hand and drifted down Crowley’s length with a light grip, coaxing and teasing, feeling an ache build inside him along with a flutter of apprehension: _I’m really going to do this. Right here._ Waited until he could feel Crowley trying to thrust, thwarted a little by the jeans, but that was fine, _holds you right there for me, darling,_ he murmured into the ends of elflocked hair, pressing Crowley’s cock against his belly with his dry hand and bringing the other around to spread him gently. He was tight, and there was the familiar little hitch of shock as one finger slid in.

“All right, my dear?”

Breathed more than said, _yeah._ A fine tremor, but also the thump of Crowley hardening more under his other hand, pushing against him. “That’s it, darling. Open up for me. I’ll be good to you.” _I’ll take you so gently, I’ll fill you._ He could feel his scrubs tenting out, his cock bumping against his own hand through the cloth as he worked, turning, holding in deep, sliding out, _you can take more, dear, I know you can,_ Crowley struggling to move against the trap of the half-lowered jeans, _I want you just like that,_ feeling the slow opening and welcoming.

Letting go of the stiff shaft, now damp and slick on its own account, to grab a foil packet and tear it with his teeth. _We could stop, you know, bein’ careful._ You learned to do this with at least a little grace, it was what you knew you had to do, long before he had anything _to_ do. Just touching himself made him have to brace for a moment and hold back, and then he was guiding himself into place, _you’re mine, every bit of you is mine._

Crowley almost buckled over the counter as he eased home, catching himself, making a few inarticulate noises. The dark window over the sink reflected a swimmy image of the sharp, long -jawed features, eyes crimped shut, teeth (he had remarkably sharp, white little canines) covering his lower lip. There was nothing out there but the car park. _Making a display._ Crowley’s legs were shaking.

“Am I hurting you?”

Low, the burr breaking through. “I _want_ y’ ta hurt me. You’re the only one wha’ gets ta. Take it from y’. Need it.”

Aziraphale held still, brushing lips over the long hair, the soft nape. Smelling of sandalwood. _What scent trail to follow._

_“Please.”_

“All right, darling. I’ll be ever so careful.”

As best he could. Crowley was tight heat, and a deep groan he could feel in his cock, and slick thrusting into his hand that paused every half-dozen strokes, leaving him freer to move: to slide out a little, so that he could look down and see his own flushed girth parting Crowley where he was stretched and glistening. Deep and short, then slow again and long until there was no way to be _ever so careful,_ was that his voice shouting brokenly over and over as if someone were being punched, or Crowley’s? Something fell from the drainer into the sink. Something else hit the floor. And that wasn’t his voice, because it was a shout of _oh angel, angel, fucking hell, don’t stop,_ and his hand was warm and trickling and he was clinging to the sink edge with the other, pulling himself into that taut _croupe_ for a last dozen strokes before. Before.

He became gradually aware that he was slumped over Crowley, who was slumped over the sink. One of the aloe cactuses had hit the lino and spilled dry crumbs of earth everywhere.

Crowley slid down as Aziraphale lifted himself, knees collapsing.

“It’s all right, darling, got you, I’ve got you,” he murmured and circled Crowley’s hips with one arm to pull him up; shifted his grip to the ribs, stepping out of the puddle of his scrubs, slipping the other arm under Crowley’s knees, the long red locks falling against his shoulder.

“Back to bed with you,” he said, and the clever hands crept up around his neck as he stepped over the chipped pot, _clear that up later_ , carrying Crowley back to the bedroom like a bride over the threshold. Set him down on the coverlet, looking already half asleep; ran hot water over a flannel, cleaning him tenderly. Folded the jeans and dropped the shirt in a hamper, working the rest of his own clothes off to snuggle in behind him. Remembering to pull up the long bolster, lift Crowley’s arm and leg over it, it helped his back.

He couldn’t tell what Crowley was saying. The planes of his face were soft, youthful, peaceful. Aziraphale felt a rush of tenderness.

“Oh, God, _Anthony_.”

“ ‘M’angel.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It gets dark for the next few chapters, but fear not. There's light at the end of the tunnel, and even pizza.
> 
> Like Aziraphale, I do, in fact, boast a graduate-level degree in Sheetology, something you acquire as a massage therapist if you have the liberty to buy your own linens (some spas insist on providing them in signature colors or designs, which tend to be cheap 50-50 percale and inevitably blow). High-count Egyptian cotton is my fave for summer (it will outlast basic department-store textiles by a factor of two or three) and Portuguese flannel for winter. Avoid synthetics. The oil will never wash out.
> 
> Come tweak me about my obsessions on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale changes his look. There's an impromptu dance recital in the laundry alcove. Adam plans for world domination, and Crowley gets a letter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for memories of parental physical abuse, abusive/predatory behavior towards queer people, remembered suicidal thoughts, and implied dubcon for the sake of survival. The narrative doesn't include actual assault, but assault survivors may find this and the next chapter triggering and I encourage suggestions if anyone thinks I need to change tags or warnings.
> 
> Things stay pretty rough from here until the end of Chapter 13, and I plan on posting all that material in pretty quick sequence, because of repeat comments about not wanting to read on till I've posted past the sad parts.

He kept forgetting to make time for _the clinic_ _,_ but he did remember the earring.

“Oh, Mr. Fell, what did I tell you? You look very stylish.”

Tracy liked to comment on his appearance, if she was awake when he left, or even there. She always made a point of telling him when she might not come home from Shadwell’s, but he hadn’t brought Anthony over. The big bed, the room uncrowded with half-unpacked boxes of books, suited better, however minimalist and echoing it was for his taste.

“Do you think? I feel quite daring. It’s been so long.”

Anthony was busy with a dye and cut when he came in; lifted an eyebrow nonetheless. He found his way back to the workroom after Aziraphale’s first.

“I have a present for you, darling.”

The little black matte box with gold lettering was barely big enough to fill his palm. Crowley took it with a slightly stunned look, opened the top carefully.

“If you’ll wear it. They come in sets of two, you know.”

Crowley looked up at his face, down at the earring again, set the box on the rumpled table; tilted his head to fidget out the faceted piece of jet from his left ear, worked the black pearl in.

“How do I look, angel?”

“Absolutely dazzling, as always.”

Bea chose that moment to emerge from the office, stop short; roll their eyes, step back in.

It seemed like the sort of moment when one could snatch a kiss.

* * *

“There you are, Hellspawn. Wondered what happened to you.”

“Mr. Sennet wanted a few of us to come in. I begged off at lunch.”

“Give’s that moulding tape then. Uncle Azi doesn’t know one thing from another here, I just keep ‘im around for decoration.”

“ _Uncle_ Azi? Are you marrying Mr. Fell then?”

“Reckon I could. You want to be a bridesmaid?”

Crowley caught Aziraphale’s expression.

“Ah, there’s a time for everything, Hellspawn. What kind of a question is that anyway?”

“The kind a concerned nephew asks.”

“Brat. We aren’t even really related.”

“When I rule everything I’ll make us related. Then you get the family you chose, like you said.”

“Is that a promise?”

“If you’ll buy kebabs.”

“Considerin’ it.”

“And we could all live together in the world I’m building in Civ. I’d let you have Australia.”

Crowley laid a thumb on the Bentley’s mirrorlike hood, polished enough to reflect the blur of his features, his russet hair; slowly unrolled a length of tape with absolute precision, ready to receive a length of trim, and picked up the power screwdriver. “Could marry her, y’know."

“I now pronounce you man and Bentley?”

Crowley vogued just that bit, laying a hand on the hood ornament.

“Ours is the love that dare not speak its name.”

* * *

“Is that ever the _Emperor Waltz?”_

“Bea switched over to that satellite station y'like -- oi! You've been busy.”

“Well, it _does_ make a nice change from that air-pudding stuff. All the spas play it, you know, it gets a bit old.”

“Here, let me take those -- washer’s almost done.”

“Quite all ri – Anthony! What are you doing?”

“Just a turn around the floor.”

“Anthony, I haven’t danced since – “

“Never forget, angel, like ridin’ a bike. Made a point've learnin', once, 'case I ever met someone _posh._ One-two-three, one-two-three -- ”

“I – we’re making a – “

“I know. Spectacle. Lighten up, angel. No one’s out front.”

“Stella and Carmine are both in session – “

“They’re not watchin’.”

”You’re leading –”

“I’m taller.”

“But if you’re, ah, _Miss Annie,_ then shouldn’t I – “

“Can’t both lead – Oooof!”

“Sorry – “

“No harm done, right in the sheets. Soft landing.”

“Really, we oughtn’t – stop _giggling,_ you fiend _–_ “

“Pardon me, gentlemen, I hope I’m not _interrupting_ anything. Is Mz. Damien in?”

“You -- _ngk, thpft --_ know the way, guv.”

“Anthony, there, you see – “

“Ah, fook ‘im if he can’t take a joke.”

* * *

The post always arrived early on Saturdays. Catalogues, invoices, another flyer from Raven Sable’s _Slender Synergies_ which Aziraphale looked at a moment and threw out, preferring to have an only ordinarily cantankerous Bea around for the rest of the day. He'd finally carved out a long lunch to slip round to the clinic. It would be another surprise.

“This one’s for you,” he said, passing a crumply and rather aged–looking envelope to Crowley. It was addressed in a childlike hand, and had a Calton postmark. There was a Carol Joy catalogue for the esthetician and a billing notice.

“Oh shit,” said Crowley. “Shit shit shit shit shit.”

Crowley was white. Whiter.

Aziraphale realized that he was vibrating with something that looked disturbingly like rage, his dark-gold eyes a thousand yards away. They didn’t change their focus as he thrust the envelope and letter out. The rustle of the shaking paper was sharply audible.

It was the rounded, schoolday hand of someone who doesn’t write often, done with a ballpoint pen that kept cutting out on one word or another so that some letters were drawn and re-drawn bolder than the rest.

_Dear Anthony._

_I am only hoping I have reached the right person but if you are not the Anthony Crowley what grew up in Gowan please only answer this so I will know. Thank you._

_I went searching round Google and such for Anthony Crowleys a few years back and found the Facebook page for the Lilith place. Its been a long time and the photo with everyone is small but looked like you. I remembered how you used to love doing me and Elspeths hair back at Secondary. I thought to write then but what was there to say._

_Da died. Since you left he said to anyone who asked I have no son. Then he had a stroke an it made him soft. They told me at the care home it happens sometimes. A half dozen times while he was in there he said he was sorry what he done to you._

_Mam dont want me to tell you when or where the services but I thought you ought to at least know._

_We are well and Caitlins youngest just took History prize like you did. I remember how you said you were studying for a life of pub quiz._

_I know you left angry. I’m sorry I didnt stick up for you more back then._

“Anthony,” said Aziraphale as he lowered the letter. “I'm sorry. That’s terrible.”

“No, it’s not,” said Crowley, taut-lipped. “Who d’ye think gave me this bad back? I hit three stair treads on the way down and walked sideways for a week. He wanted my _complete attention_ when he told me how ashamed he was that his only son was a cocksucker.” The letter squeezed in his hand like a sponge, dropped to the freshly cleaned shop floor. “And now he’s gin be a bluidy saint on his bluidy deathbed, he called Elspeth a hooer when she come home pregnant, but least’s she's nae a _fookin’ buftie_ – “

A thoroughly horrible hacking noise came from the back of his throat, like something trying to come up or stay down, it wasn’t clear which. Aziraphale closed the distance between them in one step and let a sharp cheekbone bruise his when Crowley clamped him in a breathless grip. A little of that Carol Joy would hide it if he needed to, _my boyfriend and I walked into the same doorframe_ , he thought, remembering women who’d come to the estheticians where he'd worked, three and ten times, to have bruises disguised with cover cream, poised, well-off women, before going to the police. _I hit three treads on the way down._

Bea appeared in the doorway, their grouchiness preceding them. “Wossit this morning, domestics in the back only – “

“His father died,” Aziraphale mouthed. Crowley’s fingers were going to leave marks on his ribs, too. There was a long beat of silence.

“Know the story,” said Bea. Considered a moment. “Take off. Both of you. I’ll call Carmine to come in early and reschedule the rest. Get him out of here.”

Crowley had time to jam his sunglasses back on before the tears came.

* * *

“Never thought it’d be Megan trackin’ me down, she was never any brighter’n God made her. It was always Elspeth who was the clever one, but she had to go’n marry the lad, didn’t she?”

“I know a bit about strict fathers. Just, well, not like that.”

Aziraphale had found the nearest place that sold edible baked goods (he had them all mapped out in his head by now) and stuffed a carrier with a dozen small doughnuts and two iced teas in bottles. He wasn’t sure how you fixed something like this, but food had to be a part of it. The nearest bus that went close to the Heath stopped at the next corner. It was a drab, dark day, but Crowley kept his sunglasses on, and they’d sat side by side, holding hands quietly, discreetly. Letting go when they reached the stop near the trailhead that led to the water.

“He taught me everything ‘bout cars, y’know. Always late with the rent and the bills, but he’d find an old Mini or MG that was beat to shite and find a way to pay for it, and we’d be out there on the yard with a load’ve used parts and Jenolite, makin’ her pretty again, makin' her go. He’d drive it a year, sell it, find another one. Mam said he’d have little car bairns with ’em if he could figure out a way.”

A few ducks were idling around the waterside. They seemed to find the doughnut crumbs a delicacy.

“End’ve that after he caught me with Dougie, course. All old history now, Dougie included. He was a footballer, din’t want anyone thinkin’ ‘e was a _poofter._ Never saw ’im again except at the next match. ‘Fore I left. Walked right by me.” Crowley leaned back on his elbow, gazing out over the steely mirror of the quiet water. “Give’s another one’ve those.”

He’d handle _the clinic_ another day. He'd texted Tracy before they left the shop, to spare Crowley explaining to her, then turned off his phone.

“Thought maybe he’d just never want t’talk about it again, but the next Sunday he got a couple Tennent’s in ‘im before he went oot the yard to start on the new one, Austin-Morris, she was a beauty, and when I come out to help he. Called me a name and told me to sod off. Accent on the _sod.”_

Crowley turned toward him, finally, but the sunglasses weren’t coming off.

“Y’know I can’t remember now why ‘e came back in the house? Only ’e went up the stairs, we had a poky little Council house by then, you could hardly go up ’em if you had on your winter coat, and I followed him and said – “ there was a seismic, deep quiver in Crowley’s voice now “ – _Da, can we talk,_ and ‘e turned round on the landing and there I was lookin’ at the ceiling. Hit my head on the wall, foot on the railing, landed sideways. Didn’t really know where he got me till the boot print came up on my chest later. You’d’ve loved the colours.”

Aziraphale reached out a hand, palm upward, and after a moment Crowley laced fingers in his.

“He didn’t tell me to get out, I just went. I knew where he kept the cash stash for car parts.” Faint smile. “Dunno, maybe that pissed ‘im off worse’n what I done with Dougie. _Twenty fucking years.”_

And then the glasses had to come off, because his chest was hitching and his face was wet again and the only place for it was the shoulder of Aziraphale’s jacket, and for once it didn’t matter whether anyone was walking by on the trails or not. It was odd to remember when he’d had to wonder what it was like to stroke that hair.

“I wish you could have trusted me with more of this.”

Crowley’s arm around his neck, face turned away from his, head resting heavily.

“Reckon I was tryin’ to ask you if I _could_ trust y’. All kinds’ve ways.”

_[if you wanted it to be just us]_

“You find out, y’know, live long enough. People say they love you but they don’t mean it.”

“I do,” said Aziraphale quietly.

Crowley’d been breathing through the last of the tears, and now grew very still.

“Y’never said it.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever said it to anyone. Not like this. Except Cyril, the once, and he told me not to.”

A particularly bold duck attacked the paper carrier from the bake shop, abducted its treasure with a miniature thunder of wings.

“No one else since then?”

“Well. Since then it’s been mostly about, crass phrase I suppose, _friends with benefits,_ you know, share season tickets for a concert series, sign up for some wine tastings, and then _afters_. If it was for more than just one night. And after a while, not very much of that… I suppose we haven’t really talked much.”

“Wasn’t much nice t’talk aboot. Not when I had something else nice’s you.”

It was a sweet kiss, a lover’s kiss if not a prelude to love. Aziraphale wondered if Crowley realized how often he slid fingertips through his hair, played randomly with the short curls.

“So this is why Mary means so much to you.”

“Yeah. Met her the year I finally got my shite together, took a while. Got down t’London, y’know, trains all go here in the end. Figured it was far’s I could get without goin’ off Beachy Head.” A brief smile in the tone. “But well, y’think it’s the big city full of lights and glory, only folk like we were, all you see’s the underworld.”

Aziraphale thought of the days at the charity trust, _outreach to homeless youth, nourishing body and spirit._ The young people you saw at crossings, hawking _The Big Issue._

“Got a little work here ’n’ there with cars, but they want diplomas even for bloody mechanics these days. I’d find a squat, lose it. Find a sugar daddy, lose him.” Aziraphale held himself very still. _Not askin’ you to take me on faith._

“Y'don't realize how you're falling, see, you're just sorta... saunterin' vaguely downward? Until one night I was leanin’ on the rail of Blackfriars Bridge. Can’t remember if I’d decided whether I was more in the mood to sleep under it or jump off it, mind. ‘N up she come, _will you be my date,_ she says, ’n’ I say I’m not your type, and she says _no, they’re following me._ There’s those’ll beat a _ladyboy” –_ bitter inflection _– “_ just for breathin’, if they think they can get away with it.”

“Did it work?”

“Oh aye.”

Aziraphale thought he’d stopped, but he only pulled away to brace his arms around raised, bony knees, as if this part of the story made him want to protect himself.

“She saw I was rough and told me I could come back where she was stayin’. We’d find a squat here ‘n’ a squat there, sometimes you got in by stealin’, sometimes, well, miracle I’m still clean. Last I checked.”

[ _You’re the only one who gets to hurt me._ ]

“I kept lookin’ for someplace, but some of ‘em din’t take girls like Mary and I wasn’t going to leave her out there on her own.”

“But they did, where you met Bea.”

“Yeah. I was fishin’, told ’em I could fix their car ‘n’ they said their Infernal Machine worked fine but if I could fix _hair,_ that’d be different. End up, they paid for me to train. Gave me the spot. ‘N then one day my prince came.”

The grin was coming back, watery, but there.

“So what d’ye say, angel? Still glad you woke me with a kiss?”

 _With a stumble_ , Aziraphale almost replied, but it seemed like the wrong phrase for the moment, and instead he said nothing and simply held him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, there was a girl who thought the world of her father, and he behaved as if he thought the world of her. When the family broke up, he did some things that were very wrong, and she called him out on it. For the next twenty-seven years, he told anyone who asked “I have no daughter.” 
> 
> After a stroke at the age of eighty, he asked his second wife to place a phone call and explained in the voice of a stranger how he was going to make it all up to his little girl.
> 
> I said kind things and rang off, and put on Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”
> 
> At least he didn’t kick me down any stairs; I managed that on my own out of sheer klutziness at the age of thirty. But I'd known someone whose father did, and I recognized the limp when I developed my own.
> 
> If you're along for this ride, share, reblog, comment! Question my sanity on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not just Crowley whose past is catching up to him; Aziraphale finally discovers something that can put him off his food. Carmine's still trying to solve her cash flow problems, and Bea gets an overnight delivery from International Express.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for description of predatory sexual behavior and dehumanizing attitudes toward queer people, and some degree of blaming/burdening the victim. Once again, for people who have been subjected to such, this chapter may be triggering and I invite recommendations on best wording of the warning or tagging.

Crowley’s pillow felt damp when Aziraphale rolled over in the morning, but there was whistling coming from the kitchen and a burnt pong of dark roast, and some of his flourish came back the day after that, and all of it the next. Crowley flirted with the library Gorgon, and kissed Aziraphale softly before dropping off to sleep and when they woke, and Aziraphale didn’t press for more.

The morning came when they’d have usually slept in together, but Aziraphale was taking almost all Carmine’s clients now, and lust and regret mingled when the kiss that woke him was longer and sweeter.

“ _Bother_ customers,” he muttered.

“Work is the curse of the fucking class, angel.”

“You let me sleep.”

“Like watchin’.”

“Not even time for tea.”

“Have a cup ready t'night. Your special PG Tips.” Another long kiss, and a brief press of Aziraphale’s hand against a direct message from Headquarters. “Think we’ll want to stay in.”

Carmine was there when he arrived, but only to hector an aggrieved-looking Bea, who was combing through the schedule book at the front desk.

“And you’re sending out cards to people who've missed a pedicure, just to fill up the schedule. When this could _work._ Everyone’s got a diet plan, people pay _oodles._ We’ve got another investor now – “

“Who is it, Death?”

“Don’t talk like that. I know you need the money, and I’m not going to be working again till the baby comes. This tears it.” She had the flushed and red-eyed look of someone who’d recently been more closely acquainted with a toilet than was pleasant, and the ends of her hair were damp. “They gave me pills for it but it’s not like they _work.”_

“Your first’s waiting,” said Bea, not to Carmine. “It’s in her room, I rescheduled the one you had.”

He didn’t like using Carmine’s room. It was full of posters of impossibly fit people on soft-focused beaches and motivational checklists about Optimum Health.

It oughtn’t to have surprised him to find Gabriel Sennet on the table. “Aziraphale Fell,” he said. "I don’t believe we’ve formally met.”

He usually had the handshake moment when people were still dressed and vertical. Sennet's palm was broad and thick, and even from a supine position he exerted the grip of someone who wants you to know that he can crumple you like a plastic fender if he cares to. Wonderful.

“How can I help today?”

“I work out hard. I’ve been depending on Carmine, but Bea says you have the skills.”

“I very much hope so. Anything special?”

“Sore from running the stairs at the Italian Terrace.”

Aziraphale warmed up the cocoa butter. The athletes didn’t need anything too slick. “Let me know if I’m working in the right place. Or going too deep. I’m happy to take direction, every client is different.” There wasn’t an ounce of fat on the man. He looked like the model to whom the models on Carmine’s wall looked up.

“You’ve been here for a bit now, haven’t you?”

“A few months.”

“Working out for you then?”

This was one of the things they didn’t teach in school: making chat with people you frankly didn’t like much.

“Swimmingly.”

“You seem to have _fit right in.”_

He ignored the tone in that. Maybe he only imagined it.

“I gather you’ve been coming to Mz. Damien’s for some time.” He hated thigh muscles like this. Even his big hands barely fit around them, and Sennet seemed determined to prove how _dense_ and impenetrable his muscles were.

“I’ve known them for years. I’ve always taken an interest in their welfare.”

This was perhaps not the time to ask how a _rising Tory star_ seemed to have gotten ahead of Aziraphale in the matter of pronouns. Politics, he supposed.

“It was very good of them to take you on.”

“I was pleasantly gratified.”

“By which I mean, I am aware of the circumstances of your last position.”

(The police constable walking in, the other therapists panicking in a small knot, one of them running with a wastebasket out to the skip. The detective who'd come back to interview him twice, trying to trip him up.)

“Of course, no one would imagine anything like that happening _here.”_

“Oh, I would think not.”

“Would you?”

“I shouldn’t – “

He hoped he didn’t stop speaking with obvious abruptness when his knuckles bumped up against what he hoped it wasn’t.

“You guys who do this are all queer, aren’t you?” said the _rising Tory star_ with the same unctuous inflection he might use to pose a question on a talk show. His hand came to rest over Aziraphale’s.

“A little further over, I think.”

Aziraphale was pleased to discover that he was, in fact, stronger than Sennet thought he was. He withdrew his hand with a gradual effort, closed his fingers in what was more a flinch than a fist.

“You know, you could make a bit of extra money. I know you’ve been trying to scrimp. I make it my business to know about Mz. Damien’s employees.”

A flashback to services when he was still a schoolboy: _I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth._ He’d had to go home and look up “cleave.”

“They wouldn't have to know. And if they did, well, I helped them get a property variance or two back when I was on the local Council. A few favorable loans over the years, you don’t think this place stays afloat on its own, do you?”

_It’s what they call the freeze response, when a creature’s trapped by a predator._

“I’m not bothered about ages. I bet it means you’ve got a lot of experience.” He slid the sheet down. “Little chubby, but you've got good hands, and a beautiful mouth. You look like you know when to keep it shut, and when to open it. How’d you like to put it on that?”

Aziraphale finally found a way for breath to move in and out of his throat. How remarkable. How were people born knowing how to do this?

“Mr. Sennet,” he managed, the name coming out as a croak. More fluently: “I find I’m feeling ill too. Perhaps Carmine’s actually got something catching. Naturally I wouldn't want to”

[ _expose_ ]

“you – “ He pulled the sheet back up. “And I may not be able to work on a gentleman of your ah, bulk at all. I’ll see if Mz. Damien has a referral. Of course there’ll be no charge – ”

"Didn't they tell you?" said the MP in that same fluid speakers'-rostrum baritone. "There's never any charge."

He avoided looking anywhere but at his hands as he shut the door behind him, walked with a little more urgency in every step, met Bea anyway.

“Ah – Bea, I’m not well – I’m dreadfully sorry but I had to cut short the session – perhaps if Carmine is feeling better tomorrow – “

That was the last word that was going to make it out. He dove for the half-closed lavatory door, kicked it shut, dropped to his knees and hacked as the sausage roll and tea he’d snatched on the way in took its leave, heaved a few more times, grabbed one of the blessedly real cotton towels the spa kept in there and turned the cold tap on it full.

He waited until he was sure his stomach was done with him. Until Sennet had had time to dress. Sat with his face buried in the cold towel until he heard the door chime out front; rinsed his mouth and emerged tentatively to what should have been an empty hallway but contained an irritated Bea.

“I’m terribly sorry – I’m afraid I’m not feeling quite the thing – “

“Christ, you’re not pregnant too, are you?" The eyeroll. "Okay, just go home.”

“Ah. Tell. Anthony I went home sick, when he comes in?”

“Haven’t you heard? They have these amazing things called mobile phones.”

“I. Ah. May just have to turn mine off and lie down.”

* * *

He walked for a long time. Anyplace that he was fairly sure Anthony didn’t. He’d forgotten to ask how Crowley meant to spend his morning, and was driven to a circuitous route that avoided any possible connection between Crowley’s flat and the shop.

His mouth still tasted like sausage roll, which in itself was a harshly funny thing to think about. _You’ve got a beautiful mouth._ He found himself avoiding the sight of his own face in the mirror when he finally got back to Tracy's (she had them everywhere); dropped all his clothes to the floor, showered and scrubbed till he felt raw, and lay down in his dressing-gown, completely paralyzed. He had spent his life dancing with language and now not one useful sentence presented itself. “Anthony, something happened.” “Ah – Bea? Can I talk to you for a moment?” And after that a blank white space, like you’d see on the telly when he was younger and the BBC signed off.

His text message pinged in the middle of the afternoon.

_U ok angel?_

He looked at it, almost put it down, felt wretched, and tapped in:

_I was frightfully sick. I’m afraid I won’t be over tonight._

He watched the clever little function that told you the person on the other end was typing.

_No worries. Bring u something?_

This morning before I came to work, he thought. Bring me that in a box, tied with ribbon. _Better not. I don’t know if this is catching._

_Worth it for u._

_I couldn’t possibly ask._

_K angel. Let me know if u change ur mind._

_I will. I hope I’ll be better tomorrow._

_Me 2. Love u_

Aziraphale’s forefinger hovered over the phone for several seconds. Finally he selected the heart emoji.

He thought a while, then sent a message to Anathema: _Are you busy, dear?_

There was no answer.

* * *

Tracy got back about sundown. He’d slept for a while, foraged in the kitchen – none of his restaurant clamshells or gourmet treats seemed at all attractive, but he decided on a congealed piece of baked moussaka, which he was returning to the ecosphere when he heard the door. He rinsed his mouth and flushed.

“Oh, dearie. Dicky tummy?”

He nodded.

“I’ll make you some ginger tea. You sit right down.”

The smell of the ginger was clean, kind. “Too much vindaloo?”

He smiled thinly. “Bea seems afraid I might be expecting.”

Tracy didn’t laugh.

“It’s not what you ate, is it.”

Damn it. He’d forgotten that she was almost as bad [ _good_ ] as Anathema that way, and was about to shake his head and then had almost dropped the cup and saucer (she darted in just in time) and was dumping the whole story in her lap, good job, Fell, she only wants a quiet life and now you’ve moved in with all this, and he was apologizing at the same time he was explaining, until she clamped warm, red-nailed fingers around his wrist.

“Dearie. Do you think I haven’t heard a thousand stories?”

“I suppose you have. Only I just don’t know what to do.”

“You march in there tomorrow and you tell them, that’s what you do.”

“I practically told him I wouldn't report him. A man like that can just destroy you, he pretty well said as much. And it might --- I don’t know, break Bea's heart? They’d had something with him.”

“Dear, hearts mend. Some harms don't. What about that sweet young man Adam?”

“Adam?”

“He’s a perfectly lovely boy working for a wretched man who says rude things about people’s _mouths.”_

He hadn’t thought of Adam. What kind of a person was he? He remembered Cyril saying _as much as I_ _give up for you, you only think about yourself_ , but that was different.

“If you go through tomorrow without telling his aunt, they will have every right to give you a good _thrashing_ , and I will give them the cane to do it.”

He swallowed the rest of his tea and nodded, miserably.

“Now you’re in no shape, but you’ll see in the morning. Let me give you another cup and some Hypnozan. I’ll wake you and fix you a proper breakfast. An army marches on its stomach.”

* * *

Crowley texted two more times, offering first to come by again, later sending the terse message: _U up?_

Tracy’s sleep aid hadn’t kicked in. He tapped back _Yes._

 _Me 2,_ replied Crowley, attaching a photo. Nipples to thighs, hand resting over a handsome erection, and for some reason, for a moment,

_[beautiful mouth. how'd you like to put it on that]_

Aziraphale went numb.

Another text pinged in.

_Miss u_

_I miss you too, dear._

_Want 2 show me how much?_

_I’m afraid I’m not quite up to it. You do look lovely._

_All 4 u angel._

_I’m sorry I don’t feel better._

The next photo was a narrower shot.

_Renewable resource._

The smile emoji seemed the safest.

_Sleep well, angel._

_* * *_

It was like being drunk, in the worst way. Unable to focus, unable to form words, wanting only to crawl back into bed.

The clandestine kisses he traded with Crowley were perfunctory – “I’m still not all that, dear” – the brushes of hands distracted and brief. He felt dirty, as if he’d invited what had happened _[working in the right place. happy to take direction],_ wasn’t fit to be touched. He thought of reporters and talk-show hosts and photographers and the brute power that was always brought to bear when someone made an accusation like this about a man like that. The old stories from Paradise. _Rising Tory star._ One man’s word against another.

He was passing the front, trying to pretend he didn’t catch Crowley’s hurt glance, when the familiar bellow came from the back office: “ _FELL!”_ After a few more seconds _: “_ Get in here!”

Was this all it took for Bea to decide to kill him? A sad look in Crowley’s eyes? Perhaps it was the elegant solution. He prepared to meet his Maker.

There was an International Express overnight letter on their desk.

“Read it.”

_Because of our longtime association. As a courtesy. One Aziraphale Fell, an employee of your establishment. During a session placed a hand upon. Suggested. Named a price._

_You might know that Mr. Fell was previously employed by a business where. A similar complaint. So that you may deal as you see fit. However if I find he remains in your employ. Out of personal concern for you. Will report him to the appropriate licencing body._

“I have only one thing to ask you.”

“I’ll go if you want,” he said a little too quickly.

“Are you saying it’s true?"

Odd how a simple syllable can take all your strength to squeeze out. “ _No.”_

“Then tell me what did happen."

He told them.

The blue eyes stayed on his when he’d finished. He could almost imagine there was an expression in them. Without releasing his gaze, they shouted “ _Hey, Twinkletoes!”_

_“Half a mo’!”_

_“You got someone?”_

_“No, but – “_

_“Get your skinny arse in here.”_

They nodded toward Crowley as he appeared in the doorway. “Tell _him.”_

When he was done Bea passed the letter to Crowley. They both started to speak as he raised his eyes from it. Bea was the first to recover.

“You said so once.”

“Didn’t _know._ Just wondered – “

“Yeah, well, didn’t listen when you did.”

There was no teasing out the narrative that hung between the two startling pairs of eyes. _They don’t give up on people easy._

“Ah – what ought I to do, then?”

Bea took the letter back from Crowley and smacked it down on the desk.

“Go back to work,” they said. “We’ll fight this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is what Gabriel did risky and stupid behaviour for a career politician? Absolutely. Is it implausible? Do you follow the news?
> 
> (As an aside, there was an accusation against a prominent American politician some years back involving a hotel room outcall by a "red-headed massage therapist," which unaccountably was picked up by Chinese media but not in the States. I'm not repeating names because it really was ambiguous. I read the statement given to the police and still can't decide, but the story emphasizing the whole "red-headed" thing put my nose out of joint for a week.)
> 
> If you're following along, share, reblog, comment! And afflict me on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley has a theory about Gabriel and things to say to Aziraphale. Tracy has Opinions and some giddy news. Aziraphale calls the right number.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Heart, meet wrecking ball. Please forgive me.

“Told y’, a politician’s just someone who dishes dirt on other people faster’n someone can dish it on him. True'r not.”

They were in a booth at the curry place, Crowley deliberately picking peas out into a paper napkin.

“There was a thing or two made me wonder, back when I first met him, but then I decided he was just a bog-standard bigot. Couldn’t be with Bea, couldn’t quite leave ’em.”

“Perhaps they were originally meant to be, ah, I believe the expression is _beard_.”

Crowley's smile was tired, grim and indulgent all at once. “Yeah, only if that was it, don’t think they knew it. Maybe he didn’t, back then. Maybe seein’ ’em on the days they leaned bloke, made ‘im think’ve things he didn’t want to.” Piling the peas in a perfect pyramid seemed important. “Or that he wouldn't've wanted the voters in West Bouncybollocks to wonder about. Long range planner, him.”

Bea had called Adam and then his parents (“no, he said nothing funny ever happened, and yes, I told him never to be alone with the fucker”). Then they’d placed another, even more upsetting call. Aziraphale had taken the constable back into Carmine’s room to render his report. No, he’d never done a session for MP Sennet before yesterday. Yes, his regular therapist would sign a statement, but it would only say she’d never had any trouble, perhaps, um, just not his type.

“I realize it’ll be my word against his. People make assumptions about, ah, people in my profession.”

The constable shrugged, closing his laptop. “Ah, these buggers’ll go after anyone. Can’t help themselves, what I always say. Well, a detective’ll be in touch.” Rising: “Of course we’ll check to see if there’s ever been any other complaints about him. You’d be surprised how many've 'em there are in Westminster.”

The gulab jamon was good, but he couldn’t finish it. “Back to mine ‘n’ have a drink? Or six.”

“I think I’d better just go home, if you don’t mind. I need.” It was easier to say with his eyes closed, head tilted down so that even when he opened them he wouldn’t see Crowley. “A little space.” It sounded trite and precious even in his own ears.

A short silence. “You got it, angel. I understand.”

He took another one of Tracy’s questionable herbal sleep aids and showered again.

Before he went to bed he took the earring out.

* * *

You washed your hands a lot in this job, so it wasn’t that much different than usual. Only he found he had to wash them whenever his mind drifted to it. He’d touched the man. Almost touched his. Been silent when he should have shouted. That was something the detective had asked the young ladies, back at Paradise. If the attentions were unwelcome why didn’t you. Why did you finish the session. At least he hadn’t done that.

“Poppin’ out for lunch, get you something?”

“I’m fine.”

_I’m not fine._

* * *

“Saw you booked Saturday late. Thought we were workin’ on the car with Adam.”

“Ah – I’m so distracted. I forgot.”

Bea had only told Adam and his family that he should never be alone with his employer, and that the particulars of why weren't theirs to reveal, but Adam _was_ dead clever. 

“It feels a bit awkward.”

“No worries, angel.”

* * *

“Locked up. Been thinkin’ about that first night.”

He was leaning over the end of the table, adjusting the bolster. Crowley’s arms slid easily around him from behind, beautiful, familiar, dreaded. There wasn’t a serious mystery about what was in his jeans.

“Could if you want.”

The kisses in his hair, the palming of his chest, his soft belly under the scrub top were warm and wicked and loving. “Missin’ this,” said Crowley, sliding one hand down over the front of his scrub pants, toying with the drawstring. “Take your mind off things.”

It was happening to someone else. He tried to remember when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. It felt like a story he’d read somewhere.

“It’s just – ah – the same thing happened after Cyril and I broke up. I just couldn’t for a while. Nerves, I suppose."

“ ‘S’okay.”

* * *

“Dear, I know this is dreadful, but you’ve _got_ to pull your socks up.”

He’d decided not to talk to Anathema by the time she finally answered his text – he couldn’t tell her and he couldn’t not tell her – but Tracy was inevitably there, and she had Opinions.

“I was over at Miss Device’s shop today – it’s a perfectly lovely crystal globe, you’ll see – and she wanted to know if you were all right. You can’t just _ghost_ people, that’s what the young folk are calling it now. She was worried, and I told her I simply couldn’t remember the last time you and Anthony had come up for _air_ , but I think she had the sense not to believe me, only the young man from next door came in before I could decide what else to say. I do think he fancies her.”

Bully for her. “Then she’s not missing me much.”

“And the Sergeant asked after you at pub night – “

“I still can’t trust my stomach. That was the day I had to talk to the detective.” She’d been unsmiling, impartial, but he supposed that was just professionalism.

“And Anthony almost botched my henna rinse and I don’t know when he’s ever done that. I’ve a mind to lock you out so you’ll have to go over to his. Don't push him away, love. You need each other."

"Don't you see, that would just make things worse."

"I see that you're in danger of disappearing up your own bottom, dearie."

“Funny, Cyril said something like that when we broke up.”

“I do think we've heard _quite_ enough from Cyril." Tracy leaned down to deposit a perfumed kiss on his forehead. "But you know, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

* * *

Iris had finished putting her tools in the sanitizer for the night. Crowley waited until she waved her way out and said with deliberate lightness: “Go for a pint?”

“I – ah – I think I’ll pass again, dear. Still not quite the thing.”

Aziraphale wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard someone actually speak through gritted teeth before.

“Angel, _what the fuck is up_?”

“Well, dear – I thought you knew.”

“I know I’ll go frigging daft if this is how it’s gonna be till there's a court date. This is Bea on your side. You’ll win this.”

“Please – just bear with me – there's something we can look forward to when this is done – “

“Oh? Whatever could _that_ be, darling? A special fuck with sprinkles?” Aziraphale jumped, because the extremely thick and dogeared supply catalogue Crowley used hit the floor with a loud smack to punctuate the sentence.

“That’s not fair and you know it – “

“Oi! Domestics in the back only!”

Bea had their messenger bag over their shoulder, ready to leave.

“Lip sync something or throw some glitter, why don't you? I gotta go get the Spawn of Satan.”

The fire door slammed. The air between them simmered. Crowley scrunched his eyes shut, pinched the bridge of his nose.

“All right, maybe wasn’t. Don't have to shag, angel. Just – let me be there. Like you did for me. Come on back to mine, or yours if y'd rather – "

“But that’s it, you see. We can’t.”

“What d’ye mean, we _can’t?”_

“We, ah. Just can’t continue publicly.”

“Continue? What are we, a season of _The Crown_?”

“We’ve been so absurdly – obvious.”

“Ah. Now we come to it.”

“I mean we simply ought to – separate for a while. I don’t go to yours, you don’t come to mine. All business in the shop, people will be watching. _Gabriel's_ people, if they can find anything to -- discredit me. Press. You can't imagine how they twist things, they'll be calling this place a brothel and worse -- "

“Oh, so I just push my Hold button." He struck a pose, one forefinger to his chest, the pinky-and-thumb gesture that says there's a phone to your ear, and in his best answering-queue voice said: "Your call is very important to us, please stay on the line.”

“”Only for a short time, it’s just – and perhaps you could, I don’t know, tone it down a bit? All the -- " Aziraphale made a vague flapping hand gesture. "The _Miss Annie_ business. That message on your phone, if the press call -- Nigella had to change her number, you don’t _know – “_

“I know you’re talking bollocks.”

“You didn’t hear what that constable said about – people like us – “

“Gay people, angel. Choke it out.”

“It’s for your sake. Bea's too -- "

" _They_ haven't asked me to change anything."

"It’ll just blow back on you if people find out we have any kind of an – arrangement – “

“An _arrangement_? Is _that_ what we've got?”

“No, I mean – I – “

“You know your bloody newsies’ve already _been_ sniffin’ round? When I was out on my own in the car park on Sunday. Harry Hastur from the Sun and Liz Ligur callin’ from the Express, hour apart. Knew about the charges, sittin’ on it while they troll for more, reckon. Asked if I was aware of any _sexual activity in the massage studios.”_

_[you’re gonna make me come like a kid. don’t dare move]_

“Hastur offered me cash for an exclusive.”

“Did you take the offer?”

Crowley looked as if he'd been slapped, right to a high red blotch over each cheekbone.

“Did you take Gabriel’s? He’s more your type.”

_I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth._

“I _would've '_ told everyone I was yours, y'know? Put it on a t-shirt. Worn your ring.”

“Would have?"

“Yeah, you know what, won't be the first time I've called a wrong number,” said Crowley. “I get it now, I was good enough to fuck, only I _embarrass_ you. _Oh, Mrs. Fell, you seem to have caught yourself on the coat hook creeping out of the closet. Who’s your friend then?”_ Theatrical pivot, in a brutal mimic of Aziraphale's _posh_ accent: “ _Oh,_ that _screaming queen? She’s not my friend. We’ve never met before. We don’t know each other.”_

“Of _course_ you’re my friend – “

"Oh right. Only you can just start lookin' elsewhere for the _benefits_." The amber eyes were big, half focused, as if he were looking at something past Aziraphale's shoulder, confirmation from the skin-tightener display, reassurance from the promotional brochures. "Done here, _angel._ I’m up to the Star for a pint or seven. And when I’m there, I won’t even _think_ about you.”

Aziraphale closed his eyes again. It made speech easier. “Very well. I’ll come round tomorrow then and get my things.”

“No,” said Crowley. “Go back and get your things _now_ and leave the bloody key on the bloody table. And you can find yourself a nice proper prissy boyfriend who’ll make an _arrangement_ to go home with you after the concerts and the wine tastings and never had to be a hooer 'r'else sleep on a grate.” He shrugged on his jacket. “Knew I should never've told you. Well, now y'got an idea what it's like to have someone say Fuck Or Walk."

He started out the door, spoke again without turning round.

“I came up clean. Just so you know.”

He strode out, leaving Aziraphale to lock up.

* * *

Perhaps when Anathema answered, he'd start by asking her about the class she'd taken last Fall on astral travel, because it felt as if he'd left his body. It had just walked up the stairs, down the dingy hall without his guidance. Touched Crowley's keyfob when he reached in his pocket, and felt nothing.

He thumbed the _hangup_ icon when he reached her outgoing message for the third time, then noticed that sometime in the afternoon he'd missed a voicemail.

"Hel-lo, Mister Angel Fell, it's your landlady. I won't be home tonight, love, the Sergeant and I decided to elope. Don't worry, not turning you out, we're still going to take our time looking for a little cottage. Only one of my old clients from out of town heard I was getting married and called to congratulate me, and would you _believe_ he had a reservation at the Ritz tonight that he was afraid he'd have to cancel, and he ended by offering it to us for a wedding present? Who am I to turn down a _miracle_ like that? We'd been stuck about when and where since we gave notice, so we decided let's just _do_ it and have this be a proper wedding gift, off to the registry office, one and done. _Try_ to lighten up a little if you can, ducks? Invite Anthony over, borrow anything you like from the bedroom, have a little fun. There's a casserole in the fridge." _  
_

For once he couldn't smile at the barrage that was Hurricane Tracy at full power.

He found a reusable carrier in the kitchen – one would hold everything he wanted to bring back – and, after a considering moment, several things to drop into it. Tried Anathema one more time before he left, or thought he had, but he was clumsy thumbing his contact list, there were only two A’s, and when the voicemail greeting clicked in on the other end, he heard “ _Hello, darling. This is Anthony Crowley, telling you you look fabulous today. You know what to do. Do it with style.”_

He flicked the connection off.

“Sorry,” he murmured. “Right number.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you can hang in there till the end of the next chapter, the clouds will start to break up.
> 
> If you're still with me, share, reblog, comment! Share hankies on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hounslow boasts some unusual wildlife. God is a trans woman, and Anathema's thighs live up to expectations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Light CW for illegal tense switching. :) More serious CW for being just awful, but it's about to get better.

_Welcome to the first field excursion of Hounslow Friends of Nature. Tonight we will observe the wild Crowley in his natural habitat, entering his lair at a late hour._ _He seems to have neglected his customary grooming, and he is without his mate._

_His gait suggests he has been visiting areas of his territory where intoxicant substances can be found. He stumbles over a beanbag chair and remains there long enough that we might assume he has fallen asleep._

_Eventually, however, we see him rise, walking unsteadily to the part of his den that boasts a food cache and water source. His utterances are harsher than his usual sweet vocalisations, possibly a distress call. He scoops up water with his hands in a face-washing ritual of some sort, but finds a nearby cloth to dry himself, indicating the rudiments of tool use. His vocalisations become more articulate._

“Fancy fooken cotton. Should’ve told'm to take those too. Organic bath sheets. Goddamned body pillow."

Crowley always leaves the warm LEDs on under the cupboards. He put them there himself, helps when you blunder in on a winter morning, or when you can’t sleep, and he thinks the plants like them. They leave the corners of the kitchen in forgiving shadow but glint off the red clear plastic heart shape of a keyfob on the kitchen table. He recognizes it because he bought it.

There’s a little pile of sticky notes, each one inscribed with a rude and tender message, some suggesting a secret code. There’s a folded piece of letter-size paper from Heart of Hounslow, which he recognizes too because he’s got an identical one on the hall table: a printed checklist of the standard STI panel, _negative negative negative negative._ “Good on you,” he mumbles.

There’s a last note wrapped around a small black box with a gold imprint. He’s seen it before, in Aziraphale’s hand, containing the single black pearl earring he’s still wearing. “Bollocks,” he spits, worrying the stud out of his ear, the back hitting the lino. You always lose the backs. 

When he lifts the lid of the box the only thing on the velvet cushion inside is a worn gold signet ring.

_This was in the last box I unpacked yesterday. I used to wear it at the Trust, so people would think I was married. I'd like you to have it._

_I'll start looking for another situation tomorrow. I'm sure Bea will be glad to see the back of me._

After a long rosary of seconds he slams the cast-iron skillet down on the gas ring, lights the sheaf of precious notes at it and drops them in, blue-orange fire and ash eating away _can’t wait to show you how much I missed you_ and _someone put my back out again_ and _give me a mark in the same place so we’ll match._ "Fooked it up right proper this time, didn't we?" Sparks and black fragments fly up, the dishtowel catches, _damn,_ one of the notes flutters out to the floor, and he’s running the water and yelling wordlessly as a sting of hot ash hits his cheek – dropping the suddenly flaming towel on the lino, stamping it out while he’s chucking a glassful of water in the skillet and dropping to his knees to hunt out every rogue fragment of charring paper, beating the last out with his hands.

All fours on the kitchen floor seems to be a way to remain. "Always end up on your knees," he mutters, and some of his hair must have caught in the flames from the dishtowel, because there’s that unique stench of burnt keratin, and it's down over his face as he breathes "God -- _someone --"_ then, in an even softer whisper, "Da, can we talk?," then finally sucks air in big and deep and shouts, “ _Aziraphale!!!!”_

* * *

Anathema still wasn’t picking up, and calling Tracy on this night of all nights would be on a par with the sin against the Holy Ghost. Who was left? Bea? “Ah, hello, Bea? Sorry to ring up this late but, you know, your hairdresser, the one I’ve been fucking recently, by the way, there’s a story about how he likes to hear me say _fuck,_ well, you know I've been a trifle panicked, and I may have kicked him in the head a little bit, or possibly the heart, metaphorically speaking, you understand, nothing like his Da, and he gave me the right-about, may I cry on your shoulder?” The pain would at least be brief. Perhaps the body would rise to the surface after several days, assuming they didn’t have some sort of a deal with resurrection men.

He dropped the carrier full of spare scrubs and underpants and socks and toothpaste because Crowley favoured that unpleasant fennel stuff (his coffee habit killed the flavour) and the infuser and favourite tea mug he’d brought over after a week (“the shape affects the way it brews, darling, it’s just as much an art as making coffee”). He turned his mobile face-up on the coffee table next to a fluted green glass bowl of sweets on a crocheted doily. Perhaps it was time to get a bit of practice with this business of _fading queen courting the attentions of older ladies_. Doilies might be a place to start. Beaded lampshades. Antimacassars.

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed or where he’d drifted around the flat – he had a distinct, embarrassing memory of wandering into Tracy’s ruffly pink bedroom and looking at, without quite taking in, a wall rack displaying various canes, paddles, and a silk cat o’nine tails – when he heard first the vibration, and then the Westminster Chime of his phone. Crowley had his own ringtone, but he'd never set one up for anyone else. He thumbed the phone icon, the only thing he could make out with his reading glasses off. “Anathema?”

“ _AZIRAPHALE, WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO?”_

It wasn’t Anathema. Possibly it was the Voice of God. I gave you the wish of your heart, what did you do with it? “I don’t know,” he said miserably.

“Well you had sodding well better figure out.”

Connections began to click. He’d never heard the voice without arch, high-pitched inflections; this was a mellow husky tenor, but anger had almost overwhelmed its suavity. “Mary?”

“Right in one, bonus points for our guest. For a hundred quid, what fucking _happened?”_

“Did you talk to him?”

“If you can call it _talking._ I could make out one word in ten, but half of them were your name. When did you see him?”

“Ah – closing time? We were locking up the shop. And I – “

“Christ. That means he’s had time to get well and truly trolleyed. I called the Star and they said he was there earlier, but he's not there now, and he's not here. Congratulations on the clean test, by the way.”

“That’s personal.”

“ _Anthony's_ personal for me. I’m standing here in a kitchen that looks like someone tried to set it on fire, and the Bentley’s not in the car park and you have no idea where he is?”

“You’ve got a key.” It was ridiculous, he knew, but he had a vision of Mary puttering around the flat when he and Crowley were absent, poking into the drawers that held his spare clothes, noting the state of the bed, knowing Crowley as he didn’t know Crowley.

“I’ve _always_ had a key. I've only needed it the once, but you don't forget."

“I know you go back – “

“We do. Did he tell you I ended up training as a crisis counselor at the shelter? Well, this is a crisis, sweetheart, and I'm counseling you to tell me exactly what happened.”

He explained, haltingly: Gabriel, feeling sick and soiled, fearful, exposed.

"Sodding hell, he didn't tell me about any of this. I'm sorry."

“I suppose everything just happened at once. It was right after his father died, if you know that story – “

“Oh, no fear. Every breakup, he'd get drunk and hammer on about his Da.” A little West Midlands coming out; London ate everybody, it seemed. “There was always a breakup. Always looking for the one who was more than a shag, always managed to find the one who wasn't. It was our joke but. He's never been like this about anyone. Christ, what a mess." It wasn't clear whether this referred to the situation or the sounds of industry and running water at the other end. "I told him, we're too close, I'm his sister not his caseworker, so much for _ethical considerations --_ " Aziraphale's phone made the officious noise that told him another caller was in the queue.

“Hold on. I’ll ring you right back.”

After years, he still didn’t really know how to work these things. The call went to voice mail, he hit the callback icon without stopping to listen, and found himself playing tag for a frustrating minute before he managed to connect.

“Anathema?”

“I just saw your text. I had the book club, did something happen?"

“Yes – “ and then Anathema might be forgiven for _well and truly trolleyed_ , because misery does things to your voice and face that leave you no more articulate than a howling dog.

“Aziraphale. Slow down. Is it Anthony? Is he all right?”

He got control of himself gradually. “Anathema, I have no earthly idea.” Where to start?

“You can tell me when I get there.”

“Get here?”

“I’m on Pyewacket. Not that far from you, actually. Half an hour maybe. Sit tight. I’ve got you on my GPS. I’ll call again when I’m there.”

He called Mary back. She answered without preamble.

“Was it him?”

“No. But I think" --he was surprised to hear the words coming out of his own mouth -- "I can find him.”

Mary’s voice had no rainbows or glitter in it. "He didn't even know me when he put his body between me and the yobs who were coming for me. Because that's what happens when the people who made you decide that you can go to Hell. All the devils come for you." She sounded suddenly exhausted. "Please tell me you have an idea. Or I'm calling his plates in to the filth and and telling them he's out there pissed to the gills, and Jesus he loves driving that car, I don't want to do that to him.”

“Give me half an hour," said Aziraphale. "I’m going to talk to someone who can see things that other people can’t.”

* * *

West London is crisscrossed with an impressive network of bicycle routes. Some follow the Thames at Richmond, an upscale section where ladies’ book clubs are a bit more of a commonplace, before veering off their several ways into Hounslow and Heston and Isleworth. Many are very scenic, but there’s not much to see at night.

Anathema had already put some miles on Pyewacket today, but there was a righteous sensation about a pair of tired thighs pumping past their usual limit, and the lamp on her helmet carved out a crystalline image of the landscape in unforgiving LED blue. Her Marigold Tarot deck was bungeed into her handlebar basket, along with a lavender smudge bundle, a windcheater in case the night got cold, and a bottle of Lucozade.

She usually used a different route, but something had told her to take this one tonight – the same instinct that had once nudged her to avoid a section of trail where another woman cyclist was assaulted, or the one that had unexpectedly subsided partly into a canal after heavy rains.

The mind sees what it expects to see, and that’s as true of witches as anyone else. If you’re riding along a bike trail that has a car park on one side and a riverbank on the other, you don’t expect to see headlamps coming at you across the car park and towards the river – old-fashioned, close-together headlamps shedding the warm incandescence that’s long out of date, getting larger by the millisecond amid a roar of powerful engine. Anathema didn't react until the lights were yards from her, she braked and the car veered, ploughing through the turf between the path and the riverbank with a mingled screech of brakes and groaning scrape of undercarriage. Time slowed to a syrupy crawl as Pyewacket keeled and descended toward the graveled surface in slow motion, the slow motion had caught her too, and when the handlebars pulled out of her grip with a wrenching twist of the front wheel, she saw her hands rise up in front of her with the deliberate grace of a symphony conductor ready to give the upbeat. Sharp gravel raked her thigh – curious, it was only information, not pain – and the pedal jerked her foot and slid away beneath it.

She could have spent seconds or a year in the space that swallowed her then. When Time snapped back onto its sprockets, she was looking down the embankment at a glossy, old-fashioned car -- its front end half crumpled against a tree, steam hissing from a hot radiator like a the utterance of a gigantic snake, keeled over towards the passenger side with the front driver’s side tyre still revolving in the air. Her headlamp picked out a spill of diamonds on the grass below the windscreen, and she could see as she stumbled nearer that the rear window sported a spiderweb break as if something had punched through it.

There was a dark figure strapped in the driver’s seat, in a ragdoll posture of shock, one hand still on the wheel. She shouted something – later she would remember it was the incantation against harm – and battered her hand three times against the door panel. “Are you all right?” No answer. She tried the door. The crash must have jammed it, and from this angle there was no easy way to work it open. She jumped up onto the tilted plane of the car body, planted her feet, grappled both hands around the doorhandle, dipped into a wide-legged squat, and heaved.

The door popped open. The man didn’t stir – no, wait, that was a sluggish movement of his head. “Can you get out?” No answer. He smelled like the wind off a distillery, sharp alcohol and peat, and an underlayer of what her herbalist’s nose instantly recognized as sandalwood.

His hair was red.

“Anthony. _Anthony?_ It’s Anathema. Aziraphale’s friend. He sent me to find you. He doesn’t know it, but he did. Can you move?” It was bad form in first aid, but there was a stench of petrol over a fainter hot scent of fried wiring, and it was growing stronger. She reached around the narrow waist for the seat belt buckle, snapped her hand back at a sharp cry.

The boline was in her hip pack. The everyday ritual knife of Wicca typically has a horn handle and the shape of a miniature sickle, a crescent moon with the sharp side at the inner curve. She worked it gingerly through the belt at the shoulder – he only grunted with pain then – and ripped upward. No blood. She got her hands under his armpits, heaved again, she'd feel this in the morning, and got him out onto the turf.

He seemed to be trying to get his legs under him; she hauled his arm around her neck, and stumbled in what felt like a drunken potato-sack race across the grass until they reached Pyewacket. The bicycle’s front tyre suggested ambitions to become a Mobius strip, but the bungee on the basket was still attached, and so was the cell phone in a handlebar clip. The man was shivering. She pulled out the windcheater and threw it around him, flicked the phone to life. He was trying to say something: “…Mary?”

And then a huge, hot breath blew over them, a yellow-orange glare reflecting off the phone screen and Pyewacket’s frame and the beveled edges of her spectacles, which went askew on her face as she stumbled and met the Earth full-length for the second time in ten minutes. Anthony landed haphazardly across her legs. A few unidentifiable fragments hit the gravel near them, a sting of hot ash on her arm and the back of her neck and through her cycling jersey, the unlovely brief smell of singeing microfiber.

“Mary?” he said again. "...Did they hurt you? Mary?"

The phone screen was cracked, but it still worked. She could find out who Mary was later. First 999, and then Aziraphale.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Exhale, dear readers. From here on in things start to get better, and Adam will even find an answer to the loss of the Bentley.
> 
> The letters LBSW on Mary’s business card stand not for any religious order, facetious or otherwise, but for Licensed Baccalaureate Social Worker; the Sisters don't just do comic genderfuck, they pledge themselves to "community service, ministry and outreach to those on the edges." Like Crowley, she’s had fifteen years or so to remake her life. My partial model for her was a clinical psychologist, and a damned good one.
> 
> There are probably several Wiccan incantations against harm. Here is one: _Great Goddess of day and night, Protect those I love with all your might._
> 
> If you're enjoying, share, reblog, comment! Nag me on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The light at the end of the bike path; always call a witch when things get tough. Three people can fit in the back of a Wasabi if they're friends, even more can fit in Bea's office if they don't all insist on chairs, and nurses are long suffering.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've never been inside an A & E in Britain, so I've done my best with a string of memories of emergency departments in the States. I've elided the way in which a responsible facility would observe privacy rules because nothing is more boring than administrative procedure. Aziraphale gets to see his love, that's all.

_"Newt!!_ Newt – didn’t you just get a new phone? It keeps cutting out – maybe it’s all the electromagnetic pollution around here, it’s _blowing_ everyone’s aura – Newt!”

Witches have their own swears. We will not insist upon knowing them.

West Middlesex University Hospital is a forest of squat brown and yellow structures, looking like nothing so much as an industrial park. Anathema paced on the pavement next to a railing across from the main entrance. Ambulance lights whished in regular arcs over the wet asphalt.

_“The number you have called is not available at this time.”_

She looked up to see the door of a minicab, engrossed with a Brewers advert, push open.

“Aziraphale! Over here!”

Yes, she was all right, no, it was just a bike wipeout, she'd had them before, the paramedics disinfected her leg on the way over, she might have a little gravel tattoo but that was all, and would he stop squeezing quite so hard, no, really, she wasn’t hurt but he was crushing the buckle of her bum-bag into her backbone.

“He didn’t want to go but I made him, he was blackguarding the paramedics all the way over in a Scots accent, is that a thing? They said it was a miracle he wasn’t hurt worse. By the time they got there it was more of a bonfire than a Bentley.”

“Oh dear. He’ll miss it more than he will me.”

“You mean you -- oh, stop talking rubbish. He wants to see you. I mean he didn’t say that exactly but I know. They’ve got him in X-ray now, the seatbelt locked hard, it might be a separated shoulder and maybe some cracked ribs.”

Anathema’s phone buzzed, startling both of them. The call apparently came from an Amelia Pulsifer.

“Ana? Did you call? It kept cutting out – “

“Newt, can you meet me? I need a ride – I’m at West Middlesex A and E, the bike’s a dead loss – yes, around from the main entrance – _Newt!”_

“Lost him again,” she sighed. “He can’t seem to make a single thing work. I think I have to teach him the Craft, he’s hopeless with technology.”

“Can you stay out here a bit?” asked Aziraphale.

“If you need time – “

“No, I mean there’ll be another cab along – with a young – person, well, really about your age, everyone looks so young – “

“Stop that crap, Aziraphale.”

“–with, ah, _distinctive_ mannerisms – named – “

"Mary."

"Of course you know -- when don't you -- Mary, ah, Loquacious -- "  
  
”Aziraphale. _Go in_.”

Another short embrace.

“Thank you, Anathema.”

“Just be glad you know when to call a witch.”

He turned to go.

“Um, Aziraphale?”

“What?”

“You’re going to tell me the whole story, aren’t you?”

“Of course, dear.”

"Because he was yards from hitting me. And he swerved at the last minute anyway. And I think he was too drunk to know what he was really doing." She held his eyes for a long moment. “But he was heading straight for the water.”

* * *

Aziraphale always followed posted rules, so he dutifully switched off his phone, and reported to the desk, and gave the name of the person he had come to ask after, even though he could already hear a voice drawing closer behind a pair of double doors: “You _utter Morlocks._ This garment is hideous, at least give me the _mortal remains_ of my shirt. Do you know what it cost? And _just parenthetically,_ if you want a man’s trousers off it’s polite to ask first– “

The doors swung open, and a crew-cut nurse emerged with a profound expression of long suffering.

“He’s here for Mr. Difficult,” said the desk clerk, nodding toward Aziraphale.

“You’d be the, um, husband?”

“Well no – “ Aziraphale snapped his mouth shut on what he’d meant to say and finished quietly: “Not yet.”

“Sorry about the ring. Sprained a couple fingers pretty badly, happens when they yank the wheel, swelled enough we were afraid one was broken. There’s a special tool we cut them with, he wasn’t happy about that.”

Maybe it was the late hour and the vibrating fluorescent lights of the waiting area that made Aziraphale feel suddenly dizzy.

”I think I’m a dishfaced spunktrumpet and the X-ray technician is a felching flapwanker.”

“Oh, dear, I’m terribly sorry.”

“Not a problem. He was a little disoriented at first, people are in shock, it happens. Don’t think we need to keep him though.”

“I can’t imagine you want to.”

The volley of invective had subsided by the time they went through the double doors. The nurse signaled him to pause before slipping into the curtained cubicle. Low voices. A folder slotted into a clear plastic pocket had Crowley’s name taped to it on a barcoded label.

The nurse emerged. He wore, Aziraphale noted abstractedly, an earring. “Well, he’s all yours.”

He left the curtain a little open and receded down the hall.

“It's me, dear. If you want me. I’ll leave if you don’t.”

Crowley didn’t answer at first. All bravado dissolved, he was lying back against a puffy pillow covered with a percale that looked to have the texture of typing paper. Well, hospital linens. His eyes were closed and the objectionable flowered hospital johnnie was still untied at the neck, revealing the beginnings of a purpling bruise over his collarbone. _Give me a mark in the same place so we’ll match._

“I've been stupid, haven’t I?” he said almost inaudibly, not opening his eyes.

“I believe I have too,” said Aziraphale after a considering pause. “I. Um. Think we might both have some work to do. But I think it’s worth it. If you do.”

“Then will you come over here?” Even more softly: "Please?"

He tried to rise on one elbow, winced, dropped back. Taking his uninjured hand would have to do.

“Sorry, angel – “

He was jittering with fine tremors. “Keeps – happenin’.” His teeth chattered a little. “Really – sorry, just can’t stop it – “

“Don’t. It’ll go on its own."

The faint chattering punctuated Crowley's speech. "I think I started out tryin' to go to yours, but forgot the way, y'know, never been since you moved? 'N once I was good 'n' lost, sounds daft, I know, got the idea maybe _she_ knew where to find you better'n me, 'n' wherever you were, I'd come to you -- "

"Hush." Aziraphale put the other hand over Crowley's heart, close enough that he could feel the heat through the faded flowered smock, not daring to make actual contact.

" 'n' if I went _fast_ enough maybe I c'ld even _stop_ time, make it go backwards, take back all the things I said -- dunno what I was really thinkin' at t'finish, can't remember -- "

" _Shhhhh."_

The man whom Aziraphale would forever remember as Nurse Spunktrumpet whished in through the curtain and popped a disc into the computer station in one corner. “Well, good news,” he said. “Collarbone’s only bruised, AC joint's still intact, couple of ribs just hairline cracked. No disco for a few weeks. Nothing like as bad as the old ones -- "

_[I hit three treads on the way down] [all the devils come for you]_

_"--_ you can see here where they’re mended. We’ve got a symptom sheet for concussion, it’ll tell you if you need to come back in, but you had a bloody angel on your shoulder, mate. You're full of neoprofen right now, ought to hold you till morning, you might get away with a little paracetamol and rest. You make him rest,” he added to Aziraphale. “You’ll want to keep hold of this.”

The zip-lock bags the hospital used for personal effects were meant to hold eyeglasses and watches and the like, and were absurdly large for a single gold ring, or rather the bisected fragments of it. “There’s a jewellers in Richmond repairs antiques like this one, I'll write it on the discharge sheet. Shame, but we had to.”

“It was my grandfather’s.”

“Means so much more than buyin' new, dunnit? Like telling someone they’re family now... here, there's tissues here, I know, close call. He'll be okay. I’ll go pull the papers.”

“Mary’s coming,” said Aziraphale as the nurse quick-walked out. He did have a rather broad face. “She called me.”

“Gave ‘er your mobile number. For emergencies, like.”

“I paid for her cab. It should be any minute.”

“Do you think you can try to hold me? -- Ouch.”

* * *

The second minicab pulled into the horseshoe drive at the same time as the blue Wasabi braked with a screech. The door of the Wasabi opened first in an explosion of spectacles and duffel coat and bad hair, which launched itself across the wet pavement and engulfed the long-haired woman standing there in a collision that was apparently meant to be a kiss.

“”Omigod _Anathema_ I thought you were hurt I couldn’t hear half the words are you all right – “

“Newt? Did you just _kiss_ me?”

“… Yes?”

The woman in the bike shorts returned the kiss, fervently. It lasted a while.

“Well, darlings, young love is _adorable_ but that ambulance needs to get by.”

“Oh – oh – I’ll move it –”

“You’re Mary Loquacious,” said Anathema.

“The one and only.”

“You’re right on time.”

* * *

“You remember Newt – here, take my chair – “

“That’s all right, Ana, I’m just off to the loo – “

“He’s been twice already. Nerves.”

“He seems quite fond of you.”

“I think I decided. He’s a bit like the dog that caught the car and doesn’t know what to do with it – ouch, sorry, wrong thing to say – did Mary find you?“

“She’s going to stay with him till they release him. They said he'll be all right – ”

“Are you?”

“I’m always all right, Ana – “

“Pull the other one – what’s this?”

“My ring.”

“I’ve never seen you wear a ring – “

“I might start again. We’ll have to see."

“Not this one, looks like – okay, your aura’s – well, sort of a mess.”

“It’s been a night. Well, a week, really.”

“These fluorescents don’t help – and all the EM – let me try a little healing ritual. I’ll try not to be too obvious – why is that funny?”

“Be as obvious as you like, dear. I don’t think we can shock Nurse Spunktrumpet.”

* * *

Aziraphale’s phone exploded as Newt went to bring the Wasabi round from the car park. It sounded like ten or a dozen text notifications piling their way on top of at least as many voicemail alerts.

 _Text message from LittleGildedFly  
_ _Voicemail from Bdamien  
_ _Voicemail from Bdamien_  
 _Text message from LittleGildedFly  
_ _Voicemail from Bdamien_

He bit the bullet, and hit _Call._

_“I don’t know where the fuck you are but I’ve been calling for an hour, get down here – “_

“Ah, Bea – I’m in Isleworth – “

Their voice carried to everyone in the party. “ _Is Twinkletoes with you?”_

“He's with me, Bea, he's going to be all right -- “

_"Why shouldn't he be?"_

"Ah -- I thought --"

_"Bring him too. Back’s open.”_

_* * *_

The fire door was propped ajar, a blade of light knifing out from it. Newt parked the Wasabi directly in the largest puddle of wet rubbish in the alleyway and stepped on the remains of a sandwich.

“We can wait out here,” he said unconvincingly.

“Bollocks to that.”

You can get three people in the back of a Wasabi, even if one is plump, so long as the other two are very slight and everyone is willing to be cosy; especially so if they're holding hands snugly enough to suggest permanent fusion. Injured persons are most secure in the centre.

Mary leaned up to gingerly kiss Crowley's cheek. "You going to be all right then?"

"Champion."

"You remember your instructions. Call in tomorrow, or it's _straight_ to Mother Superior's office."

"Pinky swear," said Crowley, wincing as he held up the pinky to prove it.

“Then Sister Mary shall _fly._ My tender heart cannot face the dragon within. _Make sure he does or you will feel my stilettoes,”_ she hissed to Aziraphale.

“The line apparently forms to the left.”

Bea's office smelled of coffee, and Mr. Singh's Best Italian Pizza, because this was West London, and what Aziraphale suspected was the distant phantom of some particularly fragrant cannabis. Adam occupied one of the plastic bucket chairs. The other one nominally contained a young man of the same age, who was leaning forward and nervously jittering his leg.

Bea took in the state of Crowley's attire -- one sleeve of the black silk shirt had been slit clean to the collar, and he hadn't troubled to work his arms into his jacket, leaving it to dangle like a cloak -- and said nothing about it. They glared at Newt.

“Who’s Harry Potter?”

" _I'm_ the witch, actually -- "

“He drove us. They’re friends.”

“You okay talking to them?” Bea said to the unfamiliar young man, whose dishwater-brown hair hung over his eyebrows and whose complexion might have profited from one of the spa’s cleansing packages. “Sure,” he said. “Whole point, tellin’.”

“This is Warlock Dowling,” said Adam. “He works with me in Mr. Sennet’s office. We’re mates, see, always play Civ online Fridays, and we’ve got the same birthday, so we’re twins really, except that he’s gay and I’m straight and his parents’re rich’n mine aren’t, and he’s three levels up from me but we’ve both ended up ruling the world at some point – “

He realized he was banging on nervously and abruptly fell silent.

“Warlock,” said Bea. “Show them what’s on your phone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had an alcoholic friend from college, the kind who can pass for suavely sober when he's outside enough liquor to drown a horse, and he left a bar once at closing time, got in his car and called me two hours later because he'd ripped out his transmission ploughing across a construction site in the fond belief it was a freeway on-ramp.
> 
> So we don't know what was in Crowley's mind. Anathema might.
> 
> Neoprofen is the injectable form of ibuprofen, a go-to middle way between unscheduled analgesics and opiates in emergency practice. The veterinary form is known as ketoprofen, or, in this house, kittyprofen. You're welcome.
> 
> If you're still with me, bother me on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley makes a phone call, and Aziraphale makes tea (again). Anathema is subversive. Pepper has a brief cameo, and the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence recruit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here be the awkward tenderness of starting over, and fluff, and freckles, and the very best duck.
> 
> MP Sennet's texts are based on some that various publicly homophobic American conservative politicians and religious men have sent to their proteges at one time or another. I don't make the news, I just report it.

_O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!  
_– Henry IV. Part I

Text from gsennet to wardowling [secure phone]:  
_I hope I can persuade you to join us for prayers on Monday.  
The spiritual welfare of my protégés is my concern._

Reply from wardowling to gsennet:  
_sorry sir, I was up late with friends_

Text from gsennet to wardowling:  
_Do you have a girlfriend then?_

Reply from wardowling to gsennet:  
_No_ _sir_

Text from gsennet to wardowling:  
_Do you think about girls?_

Reply from wardowling to gsennet:  
_Im not sure what you mean sir_

Text from gsennet to wardowling:  
_It’s perfectly healthy to like girls. Do you ever masturbate?_

Reply from wardowling to gsennet:  
_Please I don’t think we should be talking about this_

Text from gsennet to wardowling:  
_I care for my protégés’ health_  
_It’s healthier to do that if you wake up with a stiffy._

 _It cleanses you of impure thoughts for the rest of the day  
_ _I can show you how to do it right_

_wardowling:_

_[signs off]_

”There’s a good deal more in that line,” said Bea tonelessly, sounding infinitely weary. Aziraphale began to reach out instinctively, then remembered that they didn't like to be touched.

“Adam said I had to tell,” said Warlock, still jittering his leg. He had a cultivated accent _[posh boy]_ and the kind of studiously casual clothes that suggest a generous amount of lunch money. “Only I was worried about Dad thinking I'd led him on somehow, he's only just sorting it out about me being gay -- "

“Mr. Dowling’s something in the Ministry for Culture,” explained Adam. “Dead keen on Warhammer havin’ a career like his.”

"He'd already been -- he asked when my birthday was and I thought, that was nice. And then a day or two later he told me to make a muscle and felt my arm and said I needed to bulk up a little, offered to work out with me and I said that'd be brill, only -- well, he kept on about how I'm built and so I made an excuse -- "

"Reckon he laid off me 'cos of Bea," said Adam.

“And then he started texting. I just didn’t answer after a while, but he kept sending them.”

“So he hadn’t come in for a week and I started wondering, after Bea told me – are you okay, Uncle Tony?”

Adam seemed to finally be taking in Crowley’s deconstructed ensemble, closed eyes, slight sway as he leaned on Aziraphale.

Thin smile. “Little pile-up in the Bentley."

“Oh, bloody _hell_ – “

“ _Language,_ young Adam.”

“Sit here. I’ll get more chairs from out front.”

“His last text he asked after my dad,” said Warlock. “I’m scared.”

“That’s what he wants you to be,” said Aziraphale, surprising himself.

“So who do we talk to?” said Adam, returning with two caster chairs for himself and Newt. Anathema was already crosslegged on the carpet. “I’m meant to handle press contacts with the Telegraph and the Times, but they’re all in for Mr. Sennet – “

“Reach in my pocket, angel?”

“Time and place,” growled Bea.

“No, mobile's there – ta – “

“Anthony, it’s the _middle of the night_ \-- "

“He’ll take the call,” said Crowley. “Am I speaking to Harry Hastur with the _Sun?_ Anthony Crowley here, we talked on Sunday. If you'll make me a promise, I’ve got something here you need to see.”

* * *

“It seems a shocking amount of money for making a phone call. I confess I'm quite gobsmacked.”

Aziraphale was almost unnecessarily gentle worrying off the snakeskin boots.

“Lift up a little here, if you can.”

“Y’want a man’s trousers off, it’s polite to ask first.” Crowley’s speech was sleepy, blurry, but his tone was warm.

“May I remove your trousers then, dear?”

“Depends what you offer. Learnin' to negotiate, me.”

“Perhaps some tea? I’ve got a kettle on.”

They were in Aziraphale’s cramped bedroom at Tracy’s, since Crowley’s keys had presumably remained in the Bentley's ignition and no one had thought to ask Mary for hers. Aziraphale had raided Tracy's bedroom for more pillows to heap up behind Crowley, averting his eyes from some of her more exotic professional gear.

“Maybe I’ll buy a whole closet full've new shirts," mused Crowley. "Or put it all on a new old wreck. It’ll just about cover, be startin’ from scratch” – he hissed a little as the tight jeans finally worked off – “but seems like I’m in for a lot’ve that anyway."

“Dear, I think we both are.”

The kettle whistled. Just as Aziraphale rose to deal with it Crowley said out of nowhere, in a small voice, "She was a good car." Then, more softly: "'Angel? 'M really sorry. I’ll go on back to mine when I’ve had a kip, if it’ll make you feel safer. Mary can meet me.”

“You’ll do no such thing.”

Aziraphale sat again to take the hand that wasn't wrapped in an ice pack, used Tracy's flowered pillowslip to daub away a single tear trickling over Crowley's snake tattoo (ordinary eighty-twenty percale, _really must do something about that_ , he thought, _wedding gift perhaps_ ).

"I’m sorry too," he said softly, only briefly meeting Crowley's eyes, those golden eyes that had looked so hurt -- more so than angry -- when he spat out the words _benefits_ and _angel_ and _arrangement_. "I failed to honour your love for the gift it was. To trust you or earn your trust. I hope I can."

He spoke slowly, with the deliberation of someone not only choosing his words but examining for the first time what it was he needed to say.

"All my life, I’ve had a horror of being where I wasn’t wanted. Sometimes that felt like the world, you know? But I liked the world. I liked all the music and the wine and the restaurants and the books. So I tried very hard to avoid being someone that… wouldn’t be wanted. I found a calling that would mean I was _always_ wanted. Without my ever having to really show myself or get too close.” He paused before pronouncing the name. "Gabriel Sennet threatened all that. Not just my livelihood. I don't mean to excuse myself."

Crowley’s grip was amazingly strong, considering. Aziraphale finally looked up.

" _Don't_ need to say all this now, angel -- "

“No. I do." The kettle went into a higher octave. "I made myself very small to stay safe. You put on armour. You let _me_ inside it. And then I -- asked you to change, when you were everything I wanted. Tried to push you away, when there was nothing in the world so precious to me as you. That -- ” The ball of tears in his throat ambushed him, and it took a couple of breaths to find his way through it. "That was remarkably foolish, even for me."

He lifted the ice pack, touched Crowley’s injured hand carefully to his lips. It was several astonishing colours, but it would mend.

“We’ll get the ring fixed. And we'll talk more. I suspect a great deal, actually. But not tonight --"

" -- this mornin' --"

" -- not least because the kettle will boil dry.”

* * *

“Adam said he’d be round every day to help with a new one,” said Crowley as Aziraphale returned, balancing steaming mugs on a tin souvenir tray with an image of Brighton Pier. “Turns out that’s what he really wants to do, not work in some Minister’s office.”

“He does seem keen.”

“Might end up ownin’ it if I get my licence pulled for drink driving."

“Oddly enough? I don't think it'll be an issue. Legally, anyway. I went over the discharge papers, and do you know that no one recorded your blood alcohol, at the scene _or_ A & E? I don't know what could have caused such appalling laxness, but I strongly suspect some sort of psychic tampering by Anathema. She's always had an anarchistic streak."

“Might've been how she talked me into goin'. All sorta blurry. Tartar, that one.”

“One who apparently carries a Wiccan first-aid kit in that hip pack. Here, she gave me some valerian. To help you sleep.”

Crowley reached for the proffered cup and pulled a face. “That's _ghastly._ It smells like feet.”

Aziraphale sniffed gravely. “It does rather. Shall I pour it out?”

“If you don’t, I will.”

“You’re not to move.”

It really did smell like well-fermented socks, and Aziraphale closed the bathroom door after getting rid of it.

“I’ve got arnica here, let me put it on.”

His fingertips were soft as breath, smoothing the light oil over the blooming collarbone bruise, down the tender ribs.

“Dear me, I didn’t think you’d have _that_ in you.”

“With you touchin’ me, angel?”

“I told you, lie back.”

He took a mouthful of tea. Perfect temperature.

“Sssss. You’re meant to be makin’ me rest.”

“Absolutely. I shall do everything.”

“ _God,_ angel. Is this even safe?”

“Trust my professional knowledge. I shall of course stop if anything hurts, but endorphins _do_ buffer pain – ah, wait a minute.”

“Bloody tease.”

“No, I just don’t know exactly when Tracy’s coming back. Just a moment.”

He hung his bowtie neatly over the doorknob, and shut it.

“Now let’s see what we can do about you.”

He was as good as his word about doing everything, though he raised no objection when Crowley twined the fingers of the good hand in his hair and clutched, with a sound that seemed like anything but pain.

* * *

The cover of the _Sun_ a few weeks later displayed a very satisfying photo of Gabriel Sennet leaving the Parliament offices past a gauntlet of upraised camera phones, with the leader _Boy Boffer MP Resigns_ blazoned across it. The _Express_ , once they caught up (by then several others had stepped forward with their stories), ran with the snarkier _Sally Army MP Tells Aide: ’Blow My Trumpet.'_

A sidebar in Harry Hastur's coverage led with _No One Was Safe: Randy MP Propositioned Physio_. Aziraphale wasn't named "as investigations are ongoing." Crowley had threatened to give the whole scoop to Liz "Lizard" Ligur, cash or no cash, unless Hastur pledged as much, and a good newsman knows enough not to burn his sources. Aziraphale decided to ignore the error about his job title.

They made a pact: if _Miss Annie_ was getting too shrill for Aziraphale’s comfort, he could ask her to take a timeout. It was Crowley’s proposal, though Aziraphale suspected the hand of Mary in it. “What’ll your safeword be then?” asked Crowley, twinkling a bit, “or’ll we ask Tracy for her favourites?” They settled on _Basingstoke:_ “It’s quite my favourite scene in _Ruddigore,_ where Mad Margaret promises to behave herself, at least _somewhat._ I’ll bring the recording next time.”

He found he didn’t say it as frequently as he’d expected.

It was Aziraphale who suggested Crowley have his own phrase, for days when he needed a bit of reassurance: remembering Mary’s words on the phone, Aziraphale promised to take his hand and not let go, wherever they were, if Crowley were to hold it out and say “Shame the Devil?”

Crowley didn't do it too often for him. Sometimes, he thought, not enough.

The weather warmed up, and Crowley became a fetching sight in the car park, stripped to a dark-gray vest that let the sun multiply his freckles while he instructed Adam in the first stages of restoring a crumbling Aston Martin. Until Adam helped Aziraphale hunt it down, it had been silently decaying on the property of a deceased collector, whose family only wanted to be done with unloading his effects. "It's the one that was in the classic Bond films, seen those, angel?" Pose, pucker, flutter. " _Darling, I give you very best duck._ Sean Connery is sexiness _itself_. We'll have a marathon sometime." 

Aziraphale watched the purple bruise fade day by day.

Crowley reserved Tuesday afternoons for a regular appointment, even after he went back to work. Mary had found him a colleague a short distance away in Brentford. Aziraphale promised to come with him, when he was ready.

“I’m terribly afraid I’m going to funk it.”

“You’ll do fine, angel.”

“Every time I try to practice waving, it feels like these things are going to come loose.”

“Let me check the fastenings.”

The float featuring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (their motto, “Go Forth And Sin Some More,” displayed on a banner across the back) was one of the first in the Pride parade. This year it boasted not only nuns in various states of dress and undress (though with uniform white face paint) but an authentic angel -- white-robed, wings glorious with faux down and glitter -- seated at the front of the float with a flaming sword. Actually, it wasn’t flaming, but someone had got hold of an all-color-options RPG lightsaber.

“It just needs tightening right here. Is that okay?”

“Spiffing. Aren’t you hot in that?”

“Darling, you know I’m hot in _anything.”_

“Saucy filly. Of course you are. Only I mean the sun’s quite strong today. I’m not sure the snake outfit was the best idea.”

“It lets me lie down the entire time.”

“Ah, so ramping up the temptation.”

“Just easier. Ribs still a little sore, angel.”

“I’ll kiss them better when we get home.”

“Cut the crap, you two,” said Bea, handing up a haptically enormous papier-mache apple to Crowley, who was reclining on the green crepe-paper ruffles that were intended to convert the front of the float into the Garden of Eden. He had worked himself into a wire-stiffened, iridescent black-and-red snake costume, his sunglasses peeping impishly out of the fanged mouth, a pair of armholes allowing him to accept the apple and extend it in Aziraphale’s direction.

“Are we allowed to be here?” said Newt nervously. “Only I think I’m the only bloke here holding a girl’s hand.” 

“ _Woman’s,”_ said Adam’s friend Pepper -- she was an intern for Harriet Jones, the Member from Flydale North, who was one of the day's speakers -- and began passing out small rainbow flags.

“Room for everyone, laddie,” said Shadwell. “I learned that from readin’ Bobby Burns.”

“He doesn’t need to hear about that right now, love,” said Tracy.

“Would you be interested in joinin’ a special army, young Pulsifer? I gather ye have technical skills.”

Shadwell actually had deployed whomever his army consisted of to turf up any dirt they could about sexual harassment by persons in office. He hadn’t had much luck with MP Sennet, but two local council members quickly declared that they wouldn’t stand for re-election and the secretary of a drama group in Heston discovered the need to spend more time on home and family.

Sister Mary got one end of the _Lead Us Into Temptation_ banner attached to the front of the float, but the other kept falling down on Aziraphale’s gold foil halo.

“Give us a bit of help, grumpy-knickers?” she wheedled to Bea, who looked disgusted but vaulted up onto the float anyway.

“Did your dad really pay off their loan?” said Adam to Warlock, who was gazing wonderingly around from behind the barriers, looking not at all posh in scuffed jeans and a rainbow-hued tie-dye shirt.

“Said it was the least he could do for their help. You know they hid me in the back when the papers were at me for an interview? The mud masque was nice, too.”

Bea tilted up Aziraphale’s face, critically appraising the makeup Mary had applied. “Nice job with the eyes,” she said. “Blue’s your colour.”

“Am I hired?” said Mary eagerly, voguing in her rainbow boa.

“Maybe,” said Bea. Then more softly, to Aziraphale: “Next time let Stella do it. On the house.”

“Are we about ready?” called the nun driving the flatbed, leaning a white-maquillaged face out the side window.

“Stay, darling,” said Mary as Bea made to get down. “No, no, no. You sit right there and wave. Here.”

She took the boa off her shoulders and draped it around Bea. “Now smile, grumpy.”

Bea smiled.

It was dazzling.

Aziraphale reached for Crowley's hand. "Love you, you wicked serpent."

Crowley blew a kiss. “Ready?”

“Not even slightly,” said Aziraphale, took a deep breath, and raised his sword.

The float began to move.

_finis_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since there's no magically restoring a car in an AU, I did the next best thing, though I think this Crowley prefers to imagine being a Bond Girl. The "best duck" line is from _You Only Live Twice_ , spoken at a moment when Bond is comparing the women of different countries to the cuisine of different countries while seducing a Chinese girl and, well, Peking Duck is mentioned. (It's not in the novel, which was incidentally the first Fleming I ever read, but that's Hollywood.)
> 
> If you've stayed with me to the end, share, reblog, comment! Heckle me on Tumblr @CopperPlateBeech


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